By now you know that "Everyone is connected."  Somehow, someway, everyone knows your address, your telephone number, who your friends are, and what's really important to you.  It's an unavoidable reality in a digitally connected world. 

"Six Pixels of Separation," by Mitch Joel lays out a compelling review as to why everyone is connected and shows you ways to connect your business to everyone.  Joel has taken the disparate pieces of the digital world:  emails, social media, branding, and marketing, and provides you a clear picture as to why and how these elements combine to connect you to the rest of the world.  That's pretty compelling!

From an entrepreneurial point of view, the current unemployment stats are inaccurate.

To understand this statement, we must understand the concept of employment. Historically, employment means that you work for someone else, usually a company, and are paid a salary or wage minus deductions, such as taxes, etc.. Taxes are one of the factors used by the government to determine the unemployment rate.

Out of the blue, the weekly broadcast magazine, “B&C," started showing up in the office mail.  No one ordered it, but it's in the mailbox.  A recent cover story that caught my eye read, "Why Broadcast is Still Relevant.”   Wow!  That article speaks volumes as to the challenges broadcast is experiencing with declining viewership. Marketers are shifting to more measurable environments such as the Internet and social media platforms.  MatterMax Media takes a look at the Nielsen/Facebook "BrandLift" project, a new measurement tool designed to aid marketers in their quest to justify ad expenditures.

Earlier this week, a colleague shared a John Maxwell video about urgency. The author advocated doing with a sense of urgency.  How often do you work with a sense of urgency?  Should we work with a sense of urgency?  Is urgency required to be effective or timely? If it’s urgent, should it trump everything else?

Let’s take a step back and say that urgency is a word that we simply choose not to embrace as a form of operation. While there is nothing wrong with acting with a sense of urgency or recognizing the urgent need for something to be done, we don’t believe that you are any more effective when you operate with a sense of urgency.  Instead, we prefer to maximize.  Here’s why.

Urgent suggests that you have not been on top; that somehow, something has slipped, been lost in the shuffle, and must now be given top priority; like a house fire, an irate customer, or a failing advertising campaign. These types of incidents require a state of urgency, but we prefer to operate in such a way as to avoid incidences like these from occurring at all.  Too often, we are braggadocio about distinguishing the flames, smoothing ruffled feathers, or retracting the campaign, when in actuality we should have never let such an incident occur in the first place.

By design, we do not operate with a sense of urgency, but rather with a goal to maximize what matters. That is we strive to achieve the best outcome.  From our view, that is a better deal for the doer and the recipient.  Your effort should always be your greatest.  You should always produce at your peak.  When given the opportunity you should make the best of it.  If and whenever possible, your goal should be to maximize your strategy, sales, marketing, charity, hospitality, relationships, … (you fill in the blanks).

From our view, maximize.  It’s far better than responding with a sense of urgency.

About MatterMax Media

MatterMax Media is a full service integrated marketing agency in Stone Mountain, Georgia that provides strategy, technology, marketing and training. Our blog, Today’s Marketing Blog focuses on Entrepreneurship, Marketing and Web Matters.  If you require assistance with your marketing strategy, feel free to contact us.

We welcome your comments and feedback.

Update Your Web Site for A More Effective User Experience

We are really excited about the changes happening here at MatterMax Media.  We’re not only very engaged in our community, but we’ve also updated our capabilities and expanded our offerings, and we launched a new web site!

We updated our web site for a more effective user experience.  And, it must be working, because we have experienced a 100% increase in unique visitors and the length of time spent on the site has increased!  We developed and launched a brand new site for several reasons:  technology changes, improve the sales cycle experience, integrate social media, update our online strategy, enhance the storefront, and to support a more effective user experience across the board.  We absolutely love the new look and feel and we trust that you will too.  Please be sure to let us know what you think.