Category Archives: Business

31 December 2011

Another Visit to Spamalot

By Rick Ladd
Screenshot of comment spam

A Sampling of How Akismet Flags Comment Spam

A while back I wrote about some of the spam comments I have gotten on this site. According to the plug-in, Akismet, which WordPress provides me, I have had 18,202 spam comments intercepted by them. By the way, I use WordPress “dot com”, not “dot org”, though I have been considering moving over. I have been very happy with WordPress’s offering and it’s really tough to beat the price.

After I wrote that particular post, the number of spam comments I received seemed to level off at a tolerable rate; sometimes going for days with no flagged activity. However, during this holiday season it picked up dramatically and, in the past month I have probably been protected from a couple hundred spam comments. I think the biggest violator of my space has been Ugg boots (which hasn’t gone unnoticed by others), followed at a distance by Louis Vuitton. I have permanently deleted, collectively, a long essay’s worth of Cyrillic, some Chinese, a smattering of Hebrew, and quite a few short stories that made absolutely no sense at all. Invariably, the writing is atrocious. The most entertaining are the ones that seek to praise my writing style or the organization of the “site”, etc., presumably to flatter me so I won’t want to delete the comment. Fat chance!

At any rate, I took a partial screenshot of some of the latest (they’re coming in at a furious pace lately) before I deleted them. I’m including it so you can see what I see. I imagine each one of these represents a person who has been suckered into paying money for these attempted backlinks, though my knowledge of SEO (especially “Black Hat SEO“) is insufficient to be sure I fully understand why so many would continue doing this sort of thing.

I guess I’m naive. Fortunately, I’m not terribly gullible.

PS – To all my readers, thank you so much for taking the time to come here. I wish you a very Happy and Prosperous New Year. May 2012 bring you greater joy and contentment than you have enjoyed previously, and less damn fools to darken your doorstep 😦

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19 December 2011

One Way To Impress Your Colleagues

By Rick Ladd
Kimchi Ingredients

Basic Kimchi Ingredients

I have been a lover of Asian food for most of my adult life. Among my favorites are Korean pickled vegetables, called Kimchi. Most people are only familiar with the one you’ll find in the supermarket, which is made of (generally) Napa cabbage and contains red chili pepper flakes. However, there are hundreds of varieties. There was until recently a pretty good Korean BBQ restaurant nearby that served a variety consisting of potatoes and sesame oil that I could make a meal out of. This, of course, is not a traditional variety of Kimchi but, being raised as a meat and potatoes kind of a guy, I found it immensely enjoyable.

Our Personal Stash

A good friend of ours has been making us one-gallon jars of Kimchi for many years. Usually it consists of quartered cabbage heads, vinegar, salt, dill, garlic, and yellow peppers, plus a few other spices. My wife, who is Sansei (3rd generation American-born Japanese), calls it Koko (similar to Tsukemono) and we enjoy it shredded with many a meal. Every once in a while our friend tries something else. For instance, just the other day she gave me a jar of pickled sweet onion. We have yet to taste them so the jury’s out on whether we’ll be happy with the result.

A while ago – like maybe ten years (my, how time flies!) – she made a batch of Kimchi out of Daikon radish, dill, and garlic. Now another of the kinds of pickles I’m really fond of, and consider comfort food, is kosher pickles; the more garlic, the better. She had cut up the Daikon into spears about the size of a quarter of a pickling cucumber and they were magnificent. To my taste buds, these pieces of pickled radish tasted like the best kosher pickles I had ever had and I couldn’t get enough of them.

At the time I took my lunch to work every day at ate at my desk. I brought some of these pickles with me one day and was sharing them with a colleague and friend who sat on the other side of our 1/2 height cubicle wall. We were marveling at the fullness of the flavor when I noticed people standing up at their desks and looking around. The term used back then for what I witnessed was “prairie dogging” and I soon heard someone say “what’s that smell?” I looked at my friend and, frankly, we didn’t smell anything. We were too busy enjoying the incredible, garlicky flavor of this wonderful condiment. In retrospect, I think we were insulated from the truth because we were so enamored of the flavor, and we chose to ignore what others were agitated about lest we had to stop eating.

Not Again?

The following day, I brought a container of pickled Daikon again and was sharing them over the wall as I had the day before. Sure enough, as the aroma spread out I noted a “wave” of people standing up to try and figure out what was going on. This time I called my wife at her place of work. “You know that Daikon Kimchi Chea Yon made for us?”, I asked. She replied in the affirmative. “Have you ever brought it to work?” Her reply, “Hell No! That stuff stinks!!”

I later discovered someone had actually called Environmental to suggest something had died in the ducting and request an inspection. I know I ultimately explained what the cause of the stink was, but I don’t think it was until much later. Chea Yon has never again made that particular kind of Kimchi for us, but I would kill to relive the experience.

Photo Courtesy of Korea.net

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28 November 2011

Acronyms and the Indefinite Article

By Rick Ladd
Raw Material for Acronyms

Acronym Raw Materials

A Trivial Pursuit

If you work in a large organization, chances are you’re familiar with a reasonably large number of acronyms. At the aerospace company for which I once labored there were hundreds upon hundreds; so many we required a company-specific dictionary to understand what they were. There were certain acronyms for which most people hadn’t the faintest idea what they actually stood for. They just became the names people used for the component or report the acronym designated.

There’s a question I often wrestled with – and argued over with others – regarding the proper use of the indefinite article when writing contains one or more of these acronyms. For the grammar police (of which I am a proud member), this isn’t a trivial question. It goes like this. For an acronym, when spoken (or sub-vocalized) with a vowel sound at its beginning, but for which the full pronunciation of the term begins with a consonant sound, which is more correct? “A” or “an”?

For instance, the acronym LOL stands for “laugh out loud”. When saying the acronym itself it begins with the vowel sound “eh”. However, when saying the entire phrase it begins with the consonant sound “l”. From my POV (which, btw, is an acronym that begins with a consonant sound regardless of which way it’s spoken), I have always used the indefinite article “an” if it begins with a vowel sound.

This may seem trivial, especially with an acronym like LOL. However, one of the most widely used terms at my former place of business was SSME, which stands for Space Shuttle Main Engine. It was used a lot and when I used the acronym I would always use it as “an SSME”. However, because when the entire name of the product was used it began with the consonant sound “S”, some people would use “a SSME”. Of course, if you were to see the acronym, but read it as the entire phrase, this would make sense. However, my experience was the opposite; almost everybody used the four letters. Hence, I thought it appropriate to write “an SSME”.

Mystery Solved

As I said, this will be to many a very trivial issue. Nevertheless, inasmuch as the correct use of language is important to many (including moi), I was reminded of this distinction last night when commenting on a Facebook post by a friend. As I was writing today’s post, I was preparing to say I’ve not seen a rule that specifically addresses this issue, but I paused and did a quick Google search. Much to my surprise, and with not a little satisfaction, I found it addressed at Purdue’s “Online Writing Lab” (OWL). Here’s the specific rule.

So . . . if you have occasion to use acronyms which start with a vowel sound, whereas the item for which the acronym is a replacement starts with a consonant sound, the rule is to use the indefinite article “an”, as opposed to “a”.

I believe World Peace is just around the corner!

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27 November 2011

My First Encounter with NASA

By Rick Ladd
How Meetings End Up

From Space to Sleep

Yesterday, a friend of mine, Luis Suarez, posted some information on Google+ about sleep, which elicited a fair amount of commentary (including from me) and, in the process, reminded me of a story that comes from my first days as a member of the Flight Operations team on the Space Shuttle Main Engine (SSME) program.

I’ve written before about my feelings regarding meetings and their efficacy, which I tend to frequently question. However, this was a meeting where I might have been able to learn more about the job I was embarking upon. Unfortunately, it didn’t quite work out like I hoped it would.

SSME, MCC, HPFTP, HPOTP, LPFTP, LPOTP, MECO

The aerospace industry, like many others, is replete with acronyms. In addition, I was working at an organization that was primarily an Engineering company and I’m not an Engineer. After over two decades there I have often noted I am now covered with a reasonably thick patina of Engineer, but this was at the very beginning of my tenure and everything was new to me.

This particular meeting was a telecon with our NASA counterparts at a time when the U.S. Space program was recovering from the destruction of Challenger. The year was 1988 and we were approximately 8 months away from returning to flight; human flight, that is. Although the SSME was in no way implicated in the disaster, we had been using the stand-down to prepare a Failure Mode and Effect Analysis, as well as a Critical Items List (referred to as a FMEA-CIL). It consisted of breaking down the operation of our engines into discrete activities beginning with “tanking” (the loading of fuel into the External Tank) and ending with MECO (Main Engine Cut-Off).

To make a long story short, I entered a packed conference room designed to accommodate approximately 35 – 40 people. It was full, with every available seat taken, and there was a conference phone, on the other side of which was an equally packed room at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, AL. I don’t recall the specific technical issues that were discussed at that meeting, partly because I really didn’t have the faintest idea what they were talking about – especially because of the prolific use of the aforementioned acronyms and technical jargon, as well as the use of numerous bullet charts and a dizzying array of graphics which, presumably, represented performance data of various sorts.

The Hypoglycemia Zone

I sat in the back, against the wall, and tried to follow along, anxious to learn what I could about my new job and what my organization was responsible for. It wasn’t long before I felt my head bang against the wall. With horror, and not a little consternation, I realized I had dozed off. To make things worse, I was quite certain I had begun to snore, as I have been shunned by many because of my snoring. I also noticed I received a couple of sidelong glances from my new colleagues.

Needless to say, I got up and left the room, delaying my education . . . and hoping I hadn’t been noticed by too many influential people. I never forgot that day and, throughout my over two decades career there, I was always conscious of the possibility of falling asleep during meetings, especially terminally long ones where incredibly arcane technical discussions were accompanied by the kinds of charts I grew used to, and which Edward Tufte so vociferously decried. In that more than twenty years I also witnessed an awful lot of people dozing during meetings, especially if they took place after lunch – in the Hypoglycemia zone.

I really think meetings are over-rated and we tend to have far too many that are unproductive and unnecessary. Is this the case where you work?

Photo Courtesy of Rational Supervision

2 Comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in Business, Science

21 November 2011

The Many Uses of Facebook

By Rick Ladd

Speak Up?

Thinking Back

A while back I wrote about the dilemma I faced when I first realized my Facebook “friends” consisted of numerous constituencies, and my concern that speaking frankly to one may unwittingly offend or alienate some from another. I also mentioned that, despite this initial fear, I quickly resolved it in favor of just being myself and not worrying too much about it.

Lately I’ve noticed another phenomena that’s been slowly creeping into my activity on Facebook. While it’s related to my interest in economics and politics, it does seem to be driven considerably by the Occupy movement (I use only Occupy advisedly, as there exist not merely an Occupy Wall Street group – which started this whole thing – but also other groups, most evident on Facebook as Occupy Together, Occupy Marines, etc.)

As part of my decision to just “let it all hang loose” and be myself, I have increasingly shared articles, pictures, etc. from some of the political sites I either frequent or that like-minded friends have shared with me. As it happens, I generally characterize my political leaning as so far to the left I’m almost a Libertarian (mind you, emphatically not one). I have also responded to some posts from people with whom I don’t exactly agree, telling them politely of my problems with their positions. Most of these conversations have been quite pleasant; spirited debates over policy and principle. Several times someone has actually commented on how they were pleased with the civility of the thread and its participants.

Is Useful Political Discourse Possible?

So, what I’m beginning to wonder is if this is, indeed, a new phenomena that may turn out to be useful and healthy for political discourse. If you have a fair amount of friends there’s a substantial chance they will represent numerous viewpoints and positions on the important issues facing us. Might not we be able to understand each other better and, consequently, move away from the precipice of irreconcilable differences we seem to be teetering on lately?

I have to admit there is a bit of a dark side to this as well. Two things have happened to me that I find a bit chilling. The first was a friendly “suggestion” I received that I might want to tone it down a bit when discussing the Occupy movement and the politics and economics behind it. The impact this might have on my standing in the business community was the implication, and its seriousness did not go unnoticed by me. The second is related, but needs a bit of background.

UC Davis Pepper Spray Incident

Not Exactly a Meeting of Minds

Maybe We Can’t All “Just Get Along”

I live in a relatively insular city – Simi Valley, CA – home of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum. The City leaders are, for the most part, far more conservative than I am (who isn’t?) and I have become Facebook friends with a lot of them, including the Mayor, members of the local Chamber of Commerce, and at least one City Council member. Being a strong proponent of the right of free speech, I have spoken my mind rather openly; at least on Facebook. I don’t get into too many political discussions when doing business and I am a big supporter of local small business and wish to actively contribute to making our local economy strong and vibrant.

Last night I realized the City Council member had “unfriended” me, presumably due to a conversation I had with a couple of his friends. As I recall, it was one that received a post of praise for its tenor and the level of intellect involved. I do recall, though, I was very adamant in pointing out what I saw as fallacious arguments based on incomplete or incorrect knowledge. Frankly, I’d like to hear of anyone having a really fruitful discussion about the merits of Dialectical Materialism with a rabid anti-Communist. In my experience, the philosophy behind Marxism is little known here in these enlightened United States, and it’s very hard to receive any respect from someone who is certain of the correctness of their knowledge and the evilness of yours.

A Profound Dilemma

So I’m also wondering . . . despite my essentially being out of the job market and, therefore, not having to worry about alienating a potential employer, do I now have to censor myself politically lest I “upset” a city leader and risk throwing a roadblock in my meager, but important, efforts at making Simi Valley a better place to live? I don’t ask that people agree with me; merely that they respect my position and – especially – my desire to do what’s right for the community as I see it . . . just as I respect their beliefs and integrity. I really don’t care for revisiting this whole dilemma around what’s appropriate when it involves the core issues of our lives and livelihoods.

As well, I’m very disappointed this person decided to unfriend me. I believe we have more in common than we differ on. I also wanted to keep up with what he was doing as a Councilperson, as he uses Facebook to post from various events he is involved with. It seems I’ve been cut off from a useful, viable channel to the goings on of one of my city’s leaders and I’m still not sure how I feel about it. How do you feel about this?

Mouth/Flag Image from reading. writing. revolution

3 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , , | posted in Business, Economics, Philosophy, Politics, Social Media, Systems Thinking

31 October 2011

Fittingly for Halloween, I’ve Become Invisible

By Rick Ladd
Am I That Transparent?

Am I That Transparent?

Does Retirement Make You Disappear?

When I accepted an early retirement from the company I  had worked at for well over two decades, I did so because I knew both our business and the economy in general were shrinking. I knew, because of my position in the enterprise Program Management Office (actually, an attempt at a Project Portfolio Management Office, as I recall), there were going to be layoffs and I had reason to suspect I might be one of them. There were lots of good reasons to believe so, not the least of which was my propensity to push for the use of social media to both enhance internal communications and to better market an organization that had never really marketed itself (have you ever heard of Rocketdyne? You have and don’t even know it. See if you recognize any names here). Neither of these positions had proved all that popular amongst either the leadership or the rank and file.

I was also over two and half years into the demographic the offer was made to (everyone 60 and over) and whether they meant to or not, they were telling me I was getting long in the tooth and, perhaps, they wanted me to move over for younger blood. At least that’s how it felt. They may not have meant it that way but it felt a bit like they were telling me, regardless of my service or anything I had previously done for the organization, I was no longer needed and, perhaps, no longer wanted. Again, that’s pretty much how it felt.

For those, and many other, reasons I accepted the severance package they offered after some little deliberation and a lot more financial analysis to see just how tenable my position would be. I have often referred to their offer as a gold-leafed handshake; not exactly gold-plated and hardly a golden handshake. It amounted to about a half year’s salary. Fortunately, my wife and I had scrupulously saved and forsaken a lot of things we might otherwise have spent money on over the years in order to build up a reasonably large nest egg. With the knowledge it would be years before we had to sell the house and live out of our vehicles, and knowing the skills and capabilities I possessed stood me well in the business community, I took the plunge and accepted the offer.

Shortly after leaving I started looking around for the possibility of finding an organization that could use my services and wasn’t in the position my previous company was in; that is, they were hiring rather than laying off. I posted a few resumes with some very large companies and was even asked to apply for a position with a very large tech company that provided many of the tools – or types of tools – I had been learning and evangelizing at my previous place of employment. Unfortunately, nothing panned out and I didn’t much feel like spending more time than necessary beating my head against a wall, especially given the continuing deterioration of the economy.

Mind If We Stay In Touch?

Now, I’ve written before about the need – as I see it – for companies such as the one I retired from to stay in touch with former employees. I had proposed a method of doing so at least seven years ago when I suggested we provide access to our internal expertise location/sharing tool (an early, proprietary social media tool) for retirees who wished to remain engaged on an as-needed basis after they left. It seemed a small investment to make and I knew there were lots of former employees who, despite their retirement, would have welcomed being asked to throw in their two-cents worth on an important issue. We made rocket engines, for crying out loud, and our engines had propelled virtually every American astronaut since the very beginning of the Mercury project. Nobody I knew really wanted to totally stop being a part of that kind of awesomeness.

Needless to say, my proposal fell on deaf ears. Ironically, although the aerospace industry designs and manufactures some of the most technologically advanced products in the world (in our case, the Space Shuttle Main Engine, numerous other rocket engines, and some pretty cool energy products involving what we called “extreme engineering“), their embrace of computer technology is almost always way behind the curve. This is not necessarily so in terms of engineering computing, but is most definitely the case when it comes to business processes and internal communications. It was a source of mildly aggravating bemusement for over twenty years, but more of that at a later date.

Back To The Grind . . . Eventually

Back to this ongoing communications thing. I have come to realize, despite the over two decades I spent at Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne, my departure has made me completely transparent to the company. Many of the people I used to talk with daily, even those who are Facebook friends, haven’t said word one to me. I guess it’s kind of a cultural thing. Once you’ve retired and are presumably out of the workforce, you just don’t exist anymore. Unless, of course, I were to play golf with the company golf club. Then, at least for the duration of the game and the drinking afterward, I would exist in perpetuity. There are, as well, a few notable exceptions. Several people with whom I worked closely have remained in contact with me and I am deeply appreciative of our ongoing relationships.

Speaking of cultural mores, I suppose this is a logical extension of how we treat older people in general. We are, after all, a culture that exalts youth and all of its frivolity and mundane inanity. I suppose I should have known this would happen and, truth to tell, I’ve really been enjoying this retirement thing. I know it can’t last; we don’t really have enough money to maintain a decent standard of living and still be able to send our two young girls to college in 8 and 11 years from now. However, I’m just about ready to return to working at something that will take close to a full-time effort. Right now, though, I still feel a bit like the Invisible Man.

Photo shamelessly linked from Monsterland

3 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | posted in Business, Collaboration, Knowledge Management, Professional

5 October 2011

A New Personal Direction – Blogging As Catharsis

By Rick Ladd

Where to go? Where to go?

Why Systems Savvy?

There’s a reason I named this blog Systems Savvy though, to be truthful, I haven’t really done what I intended when I decided on the title. Blogging for me has been somewhat aimless as I’ve attempted to find my voice and considered what I wanted to accomplish. For the last year and a half, starting with my decision to accept the early retirement package offered by my former employer, I’ve considered how to use it to both promote my new business and educate the people I wanted to reach.

The result has been a number of fairly well-directed posts on various issues involving small business and social media marketing. However, I am only beginning to become accomplished at marketing, in general, and frequently feel I don’t have anything to say that hasn’t been said – and said better – by others.

Lately, especially during a period of time I have been working with an associate on a fairly ambitious proposal (which, last week, was declined), I haven’t had much to say at all. I have, however, been giving a lot of thought to the direction I would like this blog to go in, and I think I’ve come to a decision on what I want to do. Let me explain.

My original intent was to look at various world views, philosophies if you will, that attempt to provide a systemic approach to understanding nature, society, economy, etc. The thinkers I have come to respect and, I think, understand include people like W. Edwards Deming, Russell Ackoff, and Peter Drucker (among others) from the business world, and Karl Marx (an eyebrow raiser, I know, but more about that in later posts) and Friedrich Engels, especially with respect to the philosophy of Dialectical Materialism. This effort began on January 7, 2008 where, in my first post, I explained what I hoped to accomplish. Unfortunately, the distractions and obligations I referenced back then kept me from accomplishing what I then thought would be useful . . . and possible.

Changing Direction

Now, after being somewhat forced to accept what for me was a way too early retirement package, and having embarked on my journey back into the world of small business, I’m finding I need to rethink the direction this blog should take. I want to bring it somewhat back to my original intent – with one small wrinkle. I need to write more about the lessons I’ve learned; not merely with respect to the things I experienced and accomplished in my over two decades at Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne, but also with respect to those things I learned in the preceding two decades in small business, as well as the many experiences I’ve had outside of the business world. One more thing. I’m not dead yet and I am far from inactive in my community.

To do this, it seems I will have to buck one of the “rules” of blogging, i.e. “it’s not about me“. This concept has made it exceedingly difficult to share some of the things I wish to write about for two main reasons. One I wrote about earlier, and that’s this feeling I’ve had all my life that everyone knows what I know. After all, it’s obvious! Right? The second is I’ve been repeatedly asked to write about many of my life experiences, which are not quite “mainstream” and from which I have gleaned some lessons that have been important . . . at least for me, but I’ve been constrained by that admonition against making it about oneself, as well as my inborn desire to please, not offend, others.

I’m constantly working on the first of these issues and here’s what I’ve come to think about the second. I am NOT in the middle of my career. After all, I’m now collecting Social Security and a pension from my previous employer. Less than a year from now I will be eligible for Medicare and, increasingly, I will need it to deal with the medical problems that come from aging. Most bloggers I know (not all) are between 20 and 30 years younger than I am. They have decades to go in their worklife. I may have a decade or two left, but the prospect is far less certain and, truth to tell, I really want to slow down a bit.

I think a change is in order. I think I need to write about all the things I care about. I have also previously written about the dilemma I faced when I realized the disparate “friends” I had on Facebook and how it momentarily took me aback and caused me to reconsider what I was willing to share – with everybody! As then, I have come to the conclusion I can, and should, write about the things that interest me, no matter how they might seem disconnected . . . because they aren’t! They’re taken from my life, my experiences, and the conclusions I’ve drawn or the questions I still have regarding them. If some are offended by this, oops! Too bad.

Me and You as Systems

I am interested in systems theory; systems thinking. Part of my understanding about it is we are all part of various systems. As living organisms we are ourselves systems. For over 60 years I’ve felt, as most of us do, forced at times to separate my life into its constituent parts: Personal; professional; political; religious; philosophical; etc. Yet they are all – for me – intimately related and inextricably intertwined. They are what has made up my life.

Perhaps I’m getting a bit melancholy as I realize my time is surely winding down. I hope to have at least a couple more decades left in me, but there are physical changes making it clear that it won’t be the same. I am showing signs of essential tremors, which my mother had and which sometimes make it hard for me to eat with a fork or grab a small bottle out of the medicine cabinet. Just this past Monday I had a suspicious mole removed from the scar on my back that is the result of surgery to remove a melanoma a couple of years ago. My hair is mostly gray. I have chicken skin, moderate hypertension, and type II diabetes! There are other signs. Perhaps I’ll write about them too.

So here’s the deal. Although I will continue to build my business, which includes a large dose of pro bono and civic-minded activities as well as remunerative ones, I intend to increasingly share my thoughts about the rest of my life as well. I know I have written some posts that were personal, political, and even relating to religion (thought certainly not promoting it), but I have lately been going in the direction of making this a business blog. I will no longer do that. I’m not sure this is the right thing to do. Were I younger, perhaps it would definitely not be the right thing to do. However, I’m not really worried about looking for a job or offending my parents. They both shed their mortal coils years ago.

Frankly, I don’t know if anything I have to say is all that important, but I have the opportunity to write about it and, if nothing else, it will be available for my children, who are now only 7 and 10 years old. I want to leave something so they will be able to better understand who I was and, especially, just how much I love them and want the very best for them. That’s important to me!

Photo Credit: Directions by mistermoss – via Flickr

8 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , | posted in Business, Family, Personal, Politics, Professional, Random Thoughts

6 September 2011

Hey! Long Time, No See.

By Rick Ladd

Putting The Pieces Together

These Trying Times

So . . . I haven’t written much lately. I had been writing about things I believe will be helpful to the people and organizations I’m beginning to work with to build their businesses in these trying times. This has been, however, a period of transition for me and sometimes I feel the need to concentrate on what I’m doing, as well as on my current clients and others who have expressed an interest in using my services. One of those services is not yet writing a blog; at least not this one.

The last few weeks have been quite interesting for me. I’ve been working in earnest with two larger clients, both of whom require a lot of attention and even more learning on my part. They are helping me continue my journey from the corporate world to the world of small business. The differences are stark and, sometimes, very challenging to deal with competently. Frightening is a word that comes to mind some times as well.

I live in a comparatively small town. Simi Valley has a population – according to the last census – of nearly 125,000 people. Not tiny by a long shot, but pretty small compared to its neighbor, Los Angeles. Everybody doesn’t know everybody, but it can seem that way at times. It took a while, but I finally settled on a business model I though made sense and, slowly but surely, it seems to be working out. The model is simple. Provide social media marketing coaching for small businesses.

The model may be simple, but I’m discovering the execution of that model is fraught with difficulty. I think there are two things that make selling my services so hard. The first has to do with the lack of understanding – and misunderstanding – of the role social media plays in marketing one’s products or services; the second is tied to the economics of very small businesses and the current state of the economy. I am addressing the former in several different ways, but the latter is something I have little control over.

What’s both interesting and frustrating is that various surveys are showing greater and greater acceptance of social media within large organizations, but it doesn’t seem to be translating into the same interest and use by small businesses. For instance, I am working with a small development company/landlord that has approximately 30 retail tenants. All of these businesses could benefit from the use of social media to market themselves.

They are a combination of restaurants, retail shops, service organizations, and professionals – each with slightly different but closely related needs when it comes to marketing. The landlord is very supportive of the tenants, always looking for ways to increase traffic and visibility of their businesses. They’ve even offered to underwrite some of my services, and I’ve endeavored to offer a package that would be both useful and quite affordable.

Regardless, it feels like pulling teeth to get most of these businesses to take advantage of either the services available to them or the coaching and analysis I can offer in their proper use. This is an ongoing battle I’m not willing to forsake at this time, as I am committed to seeing my little town weather this economic storm and, if at all possible, even thrive. I’m working on different methods to help and am hopeful that some combination of offers will allow me to be both useful and modestly profitable. In addition, I hope to share more and more of what I’m discovering as I travel this new road. Stay tuned.

Photo Credit:

Winston-Salem-SEO.com

1 Comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , | posted in Business, Economics, Marketing/Branding, Social Media

24 August 2011

Good Thing We’re Depending on the Russians!

By Rick Ladd

Two failures in less than 10 days? Pretty ironic this would happen almost immediately after America’s Shuttle program comes to an end, forcing us to depend almost solely on Russian spacecraft to resupply ISS. As it now stands, I don’t believe we will have the domestic capability to launch supplies, let alone human beings, for at least a couple of years and, if NASA doesn’t pull the trigger on a new heavy lift configuration for the nation, it will be even longer. This may just be a speed bump but, as I said, it’s rather ironic given Russia’s long history of success.

Amplify’d from www.cnn.com
CNN World

Russia: Cargo rocket crashes in Siberia
A rocket blasts off from the Russian leased Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on July 18.
A rocket blasts off from the Russian leased Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on July 18.

(CNN) — A Russian space freighter carrying cargo to the International Space Station has crashed in a remote area of Siberia, Russian emergency officials said Wednesday.

The unmanned Progress cargo craft, which launched at 7 p.m. in Kazakhstan (9 a.m. ET) from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, was due to dock with the ISS on Friday.

“The situation with the loss of the Progress is not good, of course, but there are stocks of necessities aboard the ISS to support the cosmonauts that will be sufficient to last out until the arrival of the next Progress” cargo ship, Russia’s Space Mission Control executive Vladimir Solovyov told Russia’s Interfax news agency.

Space experts said Wednesday’s crash was the first failure of a Progress cargo unit in more than 30 years of operation.

However, it is the second failed space launch in Russia in less than 10 days.

On August 18, Russia lost a sophisticated Express-AM4 telecommunications satellite when the launch vehicle put it into the wrong orbit.

He said the six people currently living on the ISS are “well supplied — actually oversupplied” since the delivery of goods by the final U.S. shuttle mission, carried out by Atlantis last month.

NASA is now reliant on the Russian space agency to ferry U.S. astronauts to orbit, since the grounding of the U.S. shuttle fleet has left the United States with no way to lift humans into space.

Plans are in the works for private companies to begin shipping cargo to the station, and eventually to carry astronauts as well.

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18 July 2011

Are Marie Callender’s & Applebee’s Providing Us Object Lessons?

By Rick Ladd

Recently, our local (here in Simi Valley, CA) Marie Callender’s restaurant – a staple of the community for at least a couple of decades – was shut down as part of the recently merged (with Memphis based Perkins) company’s bankruptcy. I belong to a business network that has met there for most of the time they’ve been in business, though I’ve only been a member for less than a year. Still, having to eat breakfast there once a week was a bit of a trying experience, as the food was a couple taste buds short of mediocre.

The business network has a system of points one can earn for providing “tips”, which can run the gamut from a couple thousand dollar repair to your vehicle or home or eating a meal at a member’s (which Marie Callenders was) establishment. It’s a system that just invites gaming (in the worst sense of the word), inasmuch as each tip carries the same weight or value. Needless to say, many of the members found themselves eating there a couple of times a week. I never could bring myself to do so.

As part of my membership, I offered to provide a couple of free hours of social media marketing coaching and to see to it that each member had access to those services that promised to help their business out. Very few of them took me up on it; probably because most of these guys are almost as old as I am :). Marie Callenders was one of those businesses I struggled valiantly to see the efficacy of at least paying attention to what was being said about them online, especially the reviews that were being written on Yelp. They wouldn’t pay attention. My research had shown they were getting some pretty uniformly horrible reviews and, clearly, no one was paying much attention to them. I’m not surprised they’re no longer in business.

Though I can no longer check the reviews of our local Applebee’s – you see, they’ve closed down as well, actually before MCs did. Yelp doesn’t retain reviews after a business closes its doors. I now wish they would, if only so I could make sure my understanding of what happened is close to the truth.

I’m bringing this up in large part because a friend of mine posted an interesting piece entitled “Applebee’s Review Explains Why Companies Should Care About Online Reviews” (link). I think Mark hits the head right on the nail (sic) and find myself wondering if the experiences we’re seeing with Marie Callenders and Applebee’s aren’t indicative of just how useful these growing online review services are to those of us who like to eat out.

For quite some time in the enterprise world, the questions those of us advocating for greater use of social media had to answer consistently was, “What’s the ROI (Return on Investment) of using these tools? Why should we spend the money unless you can show us there’s added value in it?” Frankly, for a long time I struggled with the answer. It seemed clear to me they provided the basis for greater collaboration, easier communication, faster innovation, etc., but these things were hard to quantify in a classical sense. The answer that has stuck in my mind, though, (and I can’t recall where I heard it) is “The ROI of using social media is you’ll still be in business in five years.” I know that was somewhat glib, but I’m wondering now if Marie Callenders and Applebee’s aren’t providing us object lessons on just how prescient that statement was.

5 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | posted in Business, Knowledge Management, Marketing/Branding, Restaurants, Social Media