We created a Pure Visibility Bookshelf (Amazon Associates Link) to share the books we use and often recommend. We’re voracious readers so the list will surely grow – this “starter” list represents some of our all time favorites and current reads.

On Entrepreneurship
MASTERING THE ROCKEFELLER HABITS: This book is our handbook for being – we follow the one page plan, hold quarterly meetings, daily standups, etc. This is the closest thing to a how-to manual for business we’ve seen.

SMALL GIANTS: If you believe that business has a higher purpose than just making money, this book is for you. Bo does a great job of presenting his research on really neat companies and the common threads that make them Small Giants.

THE KNACK: I wish I’d had this book starting out in business. You, too, can have the knack and Bo and Norm are great teachers to learn it from!

THE E-MYTH: Perhaps “the” classic for any new entrepreneur growing from a team of 1 to 1+. This book created the mantra “Work ON the business, not just IN the business.”

GOOD TO GREAT: Jim Collins has done an amazing amount of research on successful businesses (publicly held ones, because there’s more data accessible to analyze) and found some incredible similarities. You’ll hear the phrases he’s coined in Rockefeller Habits and elsewhere such as the “Hedgehog concept” and “Get the right people on the bus”.

Corporate Culture
STRENGTHS FINDER: Way more than a book, this includes an online survey that provides an assessment of strengths. Once you’ve completed the survey you’ll get tips for supporting those strengths personally, as teammates, and as leaders. Buy this for your whole team. (We did!)

DELIVERING HAPPINESS: This book by Zappo’s CEO makes a nice complement to Small Giants, focusing on how creating a happy corporate culture leads to happy clients and a happy bottom line.

REWORK: The focus of the founders of 37Signals on keeping things simple is refreshing. Even the book is simple – you can polish it off in an afternoon. (We also love their project management tool, Basecamp.)

GUIDE TO GIVING GREAT SERVICE: Zingerman’s wrote the book on great service – both figuratively and literally. Personally, I’d recommend checking out their service (and the food) first hand. And while you’re in Ann Arbor, stop by and say hi!

DRIVE: Daniel Pink’s research flies in the face of conventional wisdom about carrots and sticks, making this a must read. (And if you’ve got a teenager at home, this book will prove to be priceless.)

Selling Online
TRUST AGENTS: Chris’s book is the most comprehensive primer I’ve seen on what makes online marketing “tick”. The focus is largely on social media, but it’ll get you on the right track.

PREDICTABLY IRRATIONAL: This book wasn’t written to be about selling online, but the message couldn’t be more relevant. Understanding buying behavior is critical to selling online. As someone once explained to me, if consumers strictly chose rationally, no one would carry American Express (higher fees, used in fewer places, etc.) This book puts research you can use behind why we make those choices.

Getting Visible
SEARCH ENGINE INC: To sell anything online, you’ve first got to get in front of the right people. This 400 page book is the most comprehensive reference to the mechanics of search engine marketing you’ll find.

SEARCH ENGINE VISIBILITY: Back in the day when we were answering questions at networking meetings like “What’s a Google”? Shari wrote what must have been one of the first books on search engine marketing. This 2nd edition of her original is still a good primer on visibility.

WEBSITE OPTIMIZATION: This book bridges a lot of categories, with about half of it dedicated to making your site visible. We’re a bit biased about the quality of this book, given that we contributed the two chapters on paid search. That said, if you’re just getting started we’d recommend the books above first – this is definitely a technical read.

Websites That Work
DON’T MAKE ME THINK: This classic came out when I was designing my first websites, and the general principles in it remain just as true today. Generally speaking, the simpler it is to make a transaction on your site (e-commerce or otherwise) the more results you’ll generate from your site.

WEB ANALYTICS 2.0: If Avinash writes it – read it. He believes passionately in the power of data to transform marketing – as we do! The bulk of our work these days is collecting data and making the case for site changes that ultimately help users and drive bottom line results. It’s a big, huge deal and most of your competitors aren’t paying attention to these kinds of details. THIS is how you create competitive advantage in today’s online world.

And that’s the perfect book to close out this initial list with, given that it captures the essence of what we love about online marketing!

P.S. In full disclosure: If you purchase any of these books through our store, the bookworms among us thank you – you’ll be fueling our reading and book sharing fund. Thanks!

We were excited to see Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson’s Rework. In it they share some of their iconoclastic, iterative, and wholehearted approach to doing business.

The book reflects their clean design sensibility, with pages of drawings interspersed with quick blog-post-like narrative snippets. It is a quick read, but worth contemplating. I’ll summarize the book by sharing some of the subtopics titles within a few key chapters.

Given my day job as a project manager, I particularly value their approach to creative productivity. They’re minimalists. They advocate reducing interruptions “interruption is the enemy of productivity” and reducing time in meetings “meetings are toxic”. Why? Because “inspiration is perishable.” So you have to get the dross out of the way to be able to act.

Other recommendations they emphasize quick iterations “good enough is fine”, “quick wins”, and “make tiny decisions”, and being realistic about your human-ness “go to sleep”, “long lists don’t get done”, and “don’t be a hero”.

Want some quick inspiration? Go get Rework!

As fellow entrepreneurs, Linda and I are often meeting with friends and colleagues looking for the best way to get started with a new website. And the great news is, today’s tools for building websites are remarkable equalizers. Here are a few of our favorite tips and tools, written with entrepreneurs in mind. If you’re a large corporation in a competitive space, your “to-do” list will be more complex. However, many general principles apply across sites of all sizes.

Be Findable
The easiest way to be findable as an entrepreneur on a limited budget is to use tools designed from the ground up to be easily read by search engines such as Google. WordPress is a great choice here. You can start with a freebie version and customize things along the way as you have budget and time. Yes, there are other similar tools – although comparing them is a job for another article. Trust us when we say that few platforms have a vibrant community of coders and designers that support them like WordPress, so among other advantages, it’s simply going to be easier to find people to help you when you adopt a mainstream platform.

Keep Your Design Simple
Because we’re a little biased toward making sure you’re findable, we’re going to encourage you to focus on content and moving forward with the simplest design possible. Save your energy for the content. Custom design is awesome and great, and we love our design friends and we want you to keep them busy! We also want you to get started as efficiently as possible, to which end you may consider starting with a ready-made WordPress theme. More than a simple template, themes allow you to customize many aspects of a site formerly left to true coders.

Did We Mention Content?
Being findable is all about having content on your site that your target audience will be searching for. This requires understanding the language of your target audience, as well as having some volume of content that fits that audience. Building your site in a framework such as WordPress encourages blogging/content generation, and blogging naturally adds a diversity of keywords and keyphrases to your site. Even blogging once a week is enough to make a difference, and as you add new content, you’ll find that your site is found for a wider variety of searches – without having to pay to show up in search. There’s a lot of nuances we’re skipping here, but none of them matter if you’re not generating content in the first place. Writing is your secret weapon. If it’s not your bag, hire a copywriter to interview you and write articles. It’ll be the best investment you’ve ever made.

Include A Call to Action
What’s a call to action, you might ask? Just conjure up an old Billy Mays ad: “Call Now!” “Order in the next 15 minutes, and get a second one a free!” etc. If you’re bothering to attract someone to your site, you need to know what you want them to do when they get there. That’s your call to action. Make it clear. Make it big. Make it bold. Just like Billy.

Measure!
When you’re starting out, it’s tempting to say that you’ll know when this is all working because the phone will ring. While true, that’s a lagging indicator that doesn’t provide sufficient feedback to guide systematic improvements to your site. To gather that data, there are two free tools every site needs: Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools. There are others, but if you’re only going to do two, start with these.

In addition to installing those tools (start collecting data now, even if you don’t plan on using it right away) we recommend measuring a couple more things:

• Track phone calls. Eliminate guessing. Know exactly which phone calls came from the web. One of our favorites tools for phone tracking is Mongoose Metrics, which scales nicely from a single phone number designed to track all web leads, to enterprise class solutions with staggering numbers of unique phone numbers and sophisticated tracking that integrates with other systems like Google Analytics and Google AdWords.
• Use contact forms. Avoid using simple email/mailto links like the plague. Use a contact form to collect information – just enough information and no more. In the early days, chances are you would prefer to follow up and ask a few more questions than risk losing the lead because the form scared a prospect away. And if at all possible, make sure the contact form flows automatically into some sort of customer database / CRM tool. With tools like salesforce.com this is cheap and easy even for small organizations. And it’s a lot easier to implement when you’re still small. Do it now.

While this list may not sound very “SEOy”, that’s the ironic thing about how Search Engine Optimization has evolved. It used to be about title tags and such, but these days those tactics are often just the cost of entry. It you want to turn your website into Your Online Sales Engine, you’ll need more than the “traditional” SEO tactics – you’ll eventually need to build a system like the one we’ve outlined here.

Keep us posted on your progress – we can’t wait to hear your results!!

I am frequently asked about online tools for managing event registrations, so this time I dug up an analysis Mark wrote while evaluating which tool we would use here at Pure Visibility. It’s not an exhaustive list; rather, we focused on some of the most inexpensive event management services and the major points of differentiation between them.

Eventbrite
We chose Eventbrite because there is no charge for free events (like our Donuts & Search Engine Marketing) and they charge 2.5% of the ticket price for paid events with a maximum charge of $9.95. They recently implemented a survey feature which is convenient, and they also allow you to accept many types of payment methods. They allow a little bit of customization to the event page for your event and they offer many different ways to promote your events (feeds, buttons, etc.) They offer good reporting features, the ability to print name badges, and the ability to offer discounts.

Brown Paper Tickets
This is a free solution that allows you to set up a page on the Brown Paper Ticket site where you can post events and links to your site. You cannot actually sell tickets through the site; they use a 3rd party which charges the same fee as Eventbrite (2.5%). Eventbrite is more of an all in one solution whereas this site is more like a Craigslist for events.

RegOnline
RegOnline appears to be a good tool, but they charge no matter what type of event you are hosting (free or paid events.) $4.75 per registrant for events under 120 attendees, and $3.50 per registrant plus $150 for events with more than 120 attendees. There is also a charge to accept credit card payments. It appears that they offer more customization and support with registration forms/event webpage; they allow you to print name badges, and have some good reporting features. It has many of the same features as Eventbrite, but the price point made Eventbrite win out.

I would like to point you to a favorite article on the topic of Facebook vs. LinkedIn, but after browsing a couple pages of Google results I’m here writing because there was a disappointing amount of industry-centric commentary. We’ve got A-List bloggers scorning one or both systems (hardly a “use case” or fair comparison for the average business person); pundits debating which network will succeed, and scenarios describing the use of these systems in getting (and unintentionally losing) jobs, etc.

While all of that analysis has its place, what do Facebook and LinkedIn offer to the average business person? Here’s my “elevator pitch” answer…

LinkedIn
If you’ve got a business card or a resume, you need to be on LinkedIn. It’s a tool for sharing professional recommendations, which means you belong here if you’re working on growing your business or your professional network. Period.

Facebook
If you want to get back in touch with your buddies from college and high school, join FaceBook. That’s what it was designed for, and what it still does best.

For a little more detail on both LinkedIn and Facebook, read on: Read More

Pure Visibility has undertaken the strategic planning process described in Verne Harnish’s book Mastering the Rockefeller Habits: What you must do to increase the value of your growing firm. All of us here have read a fair number of management books, attended seminars on process, and the like. Heck, some of us have even taught seminars and workshops on process. But, we knew it was time to take a higher-level view, and Catherine Juon, our fearless Co-Founder, discovered the Rockefeller Habits book and inspired us to take it to heart.

She arranged that we each got our very own copy. In late winter (prior to our second quarter), we followed it and the supporting materials on Verne’s leadership and executive development website to conduct the critical first step – the One Page Strategic Plan.

In a 2-day strategy offsite, we constructed the following:

• Pure Visibility’s 5 Core Values
• Our Purpose, Big Hairy Audacious Goal, and 5 actions we can take in the next quarter to live these on a daily basis
• 3-5 year targets, our brand promise, and key thrusts/capabilities (our priorities for the next 3-5 years)
• 1 year goals
• Our quarterly goals (financials, critical #s, and “rocks”)
• Our quarterly theme, goal, and celebration/reward, and
• Individual accountabilities towards these goals

Yes, it sounds like a lot in 2 days. The participants were exhausted by the end, but it was a powerful process, not least because it bonded our team together and refreshed what brought us together in the first place. An especially powerful component was deciding what we were going to postpone – what we weren’t doing this quarter.

We recently had our second quarterly planning meeting, where we revisited what we’d accomplished, and then brainstormed this quarter’s priorities. Especially fascinating was that some of the tabled items from the previous quarter were now “ripe for the picking” in that we had the space to address them this quarter. Other tabled items stayed tabled until next time or never.

One of Verne’s key messages is in the first few pages of the book:

Anyone with children will recognize the fundamentals I’ve summarized as:

1. Have a handful of rules
2. Repeat yourself a lot
3. Act consistently with those rules (which is why you better have only a few rules).

p. xxi, Mastering the Rockefeller Habits: What you must do to increase the value of your growing firm.

Here’s to simplicity and focus, renewed and revisited. Go Team!

I am frequently asked by early stage entrepreneurs what software we use, so here’s a quick list of the five online applications I can’t live without.

1. Salesforce.com. I started using salesforce back in the demo days when you could get a 3 user license that did everything for $50/month. Ah, those were the days… These days, it’s amazing we don’t scare off new employees with the mantra “it’s in salesforce” as the answer to seemingly every question. Seriously though, salesforce is where I spend my day. Every person who fills out a contact form on this website winds up in there automagically, and every person I’m supposed to call or have ever called is in there. (It’s a founders job to sell, after all.) Essentially, Salesforce.com functions as a much needed extension of my brain as our sales pipeline grows, and it’s pretty darn handy for sharing customer contact info within the company.




2. Basecamp. Yes, salesforce has project management stuff you can tack on, but lets just say it wasn’t a huge hit when we tried it. Not that basecamp is absolutely perfect either, but you know they’re doing something right when you turn it on and people start adding data without any arm twisting. Basecamp also shares something in common with one of my favorite things about salesforce: the “wish for it and it will come” feature. I suppose it helps that we aren’t shy about sharing what features we need , but we’ve happily seen things appear over time such as cross-project search and posting via email that make our lives SO much simpler.




3. Socialtext. I wasn’t exactly sure we needed a wiki as yet-another-place-to-store-data. But once again, it’s hard to argue with a technology that is easily adopted by the organization and has taken on a life of its own. In a way, it’s like a giant shared filing cabinet for everything about anything internal. (Whereas basecamp shares project-specific data, and salesforce captures the sales process. So it’s not as complicated to have 3 systems as it might sound.)




4. blist. I’m adding this to the list a bit early, as it’s still got a ways to go to get through all the bugs. However, I would will it out of beta, if I could. It’s not uncommon to need to compare a list of stuff and figure out which entries match criteria a, b, and c. Blist does this with “lenses” over an online spreadsheet with simple and/or choices; no programming lingo (ie SQL) required. I honestly haven’t seen anything similar, but let me know if you have!




5. twitter. I have been known to say we’re in the business of creating serendipity, and I think that’s what I love most about Twitter. This micro-blogging tool encourages you to share what you’re experiencing or thinking in 140 character bursts. And because people can follow either your persona OR create feeds on any word of interest, you wind up serendipitously meeting people with similar interests. People who often become instant friends, pitching in and answering questions or cheerleading when you have a breakthrough moment at 2 am. Twitter is a truly social network that I’m grateful for as an entrepreneur.

   So that’s my top five web applications – what are yours?

Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti are more than Michigan Football, although that is one thing that makes living here exciting. We’re more than the University of Michigan and Eastern Michigan University. We have a great community of wonderful and innovative tech companies here such as:

• Accuri Cytometers – a powerful, compact yet inexpensive flow cytometer
• Adaptive Materials – portable solid oxide fuel cells – clean, long lasting portable power

(just to do the A’s)

and wonderful resources, such as Ann Arbor SPARK working to ignite innovation through supporting and growing the community of businesses through talent retention, business acceleration, and business retention, expansion and relocation. We recently listed some of our favorite groups and organizations supporting technology and entrepreneurship. All this activity goes to show that the midwest is a hotbed of creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation.

Add another great event to the list! Ann Arbor is hosting its very own Startup Weekend June 20-22, 2008.

The weekend will bring together idea people and worker bees, marketing wonks and financial types, designers and developers, business folk and gear heads, web junkies and pragmatic project managers to build a set of new companies. The intense, 54-hour event starts Friday evening, goes all day Saturday and Sunday. The goal of the weekend is to enhance the local community of entrepreneurs, foster some new collaborative endeavors, and get some startups up and started.

Startup weekend is a national movement, with start-up weekend events in cities all around the US. Ann Arbor was picked from a list of cities based on local interest, in a web poll. Some international cities are currently up for votes. The last three startup weekends happened in Boulder, CO, Memphis, TN, and Portland, ME.

Startup Weekend provides a facilitator, Ann Arbor commercial and residential real estate management company McKinley donated the space, and the hard work and ideas will be contributed and fostered by the participants.

Hear ye, hear ye. Inviting all entrepreneurs, entrepreneur wannabes, and those contemplating entrepreneurship to learn more about the logistics, the location, and the yummy goodness happening at Ann Arbor’s Startup Weekend. Get your tickets from the Ann Arbor Startup Weekend website!

In a conversation with an out-of-stater earlier this week, I was asked what’s going on in the Michigan technology community, and what were the groups to connect with?

I rattled off a few, and started Googling for a list, figuring this had to be documented already. But I didn’t spot anything immediately. So here’s my first stab at a list of technology organizations in Michigan (particularly southeast Michigan), and please add comments with additional resources. I look forward to hearing about your favorite technology networking groups!

Networking “Groups” for Technology Entrepreneurs

• Digital Edge – Connecting Michigan’s Digital Entrepreneurs With a World of Resources (with some emphasis on those seeking capital)
• Michigan Innovators – A video blog of Michigan companies in the Global Innovation Economy, with real-world events in the making
• SPARK – Promotes the economic development of innovation-based businesses in the Ann Arbor region by offering programs, great resources, and more
• MSBTDC – Michigan Small Business & Technology Development Center – Although not limited to technology, they have been a huge resource for us, so this list wouldn’t be complete without them!
• New Enterprise Forum – Also not exclusively focused on technology, but a place where you’ll find technology companies making their pitch for investment

Networking “Groups” for Technologists (and friends)

• A2B3 – Possibly THE networking event for job seekers and posters in technology in Ann Arbor, even though (or perhaps because) it’s one of the most informal
• Open Coffee Networking Group a group organized by SPARK for entrepreneurs to network in an informal environment (over coffee once a month in a morning), again not limited to technology, but given Ann Arbor’s environment, it includes several technology types

Niche Technology-ish Groups You Might Find PV’ers and Friends at:

• Southeast Michigan Ruby Users Group – a gathering of local Ruby enthusiasts
• Ann Arbor Drupal Users Group – a monthly meeting for the proficient and just curious about Drupal, an open source content management system
• Web Analytics Wednesday (looks like there’s not a current event scheduled, but should be soon)
• Michigan Usability Professionals Association chapter meetings – a group of user experience design, usability, and information architecture folks, meets almost monthly. Current officers include PV’s very own User Experiologist Mike Beasley and our Director of Happiness, Dunrie Greiling
• Agile Groupies – an informal networking group for those practicing and those interested in agile methods
• Refresh-Detroit – monthly forum for web professionals promoting standards, usability, and accessibility in the Ann Arbor/SE Michigan area

Annual Technology-ish Events

• Annual Collaboration for Entrepreneurship – an annual event celebrating and promoting innovative technology commercialization and development opportunities in Michigan
• Internet User Experience – an annual conference highlighting methods to improve website user experience, 5th annual event will occur winter 2009
• Startup Weekend – coming to Ann Arbor in June, 2008
• ArbCamp – an unconference social media event (our writeup of the last one) – next time and location TBD
• Agile Coach Camp an unconference on agile development, May 30-June 1, 2008

I just got teased today by the astute Bud Gibson of Michigan Innovators that there aren’t any obvious links to find Linda and I on Twitter from the Pure Visibility website. So here they are:

Catherine Juon: http://www.twitter.com/cjuon
Linda Girard: http://www.twitter.com/lgirard
And of course Bud’s group on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/innovators

And since the next logical question is “Why do you use Twitter?”, here goes…

Twitter, like LinkedIn (see my earlier post about Getting LinkedIn), has required effort + patience before anything interesting happened. People tend to give up when nothing happens right away. But you know what? This online stuff isn’t any different from real-world networking.

Have you ever gone to a group/association/networking event full of people you didn’t know and come home from the first one with a million dollar project? (If you have, I’d like to talk to you – email me at cjuon @ purevisibility.com)

Spending time with Twitter is much like going to a networking event.

• There are some people I know there (those are the ones I connected with first),
• some friends I invited to catch up with me there (like Catherine Buerkle in Germany – it has been a great way to feel like we’re not an ocean apart)
• and lots of new friends that I’ve made there because they know someone in one of the first two categories,
• and lots of new friends that found me because I said something that happened to resonate in some way – like talking about Detroit, or Michigan, or the Red Cross or Search Engine Optimization, etc.

And THIS is what I would argue makes Twitter cool. It’s not just that its 140 character limit creates short and digestible messages (tho that REALLY helps). It’s that it adds a whole new dimension to networking. Beyond the traditional way of finding someone through somebody who knows someone (such as in traditional networking or online communities like LinkedIn), you can randomly find people who share an interest in a common topic though tools that allow you to effectively “follow” words (vs. just people).

And for whatever reason, Twitter seems to be a community full of people that are open to this sort of serendipitous networking. People who generally enjoy reading each others stuff, and who seem to enjoy the role of being good samaritans. I could write a book full of examples, but here are a few:

• When my used but well-loved convertible got totaled while sitting in front of the house, I twittered my state of bummed-outedness and got immediate responses from people I barely know to cheer me up. (How cool is that?)
• When a Twitter friend was diagnosed with cancer, the world seemed to swell up around her and offer help in a way that has already been really well documented – just search for Frozen Pea Fund (long story, but you’ll find out why it’s so named eventually).
• When we were looking for websites designed in the Midwest for Create magazine and Twittered out a call for submissions, we got immediate answers… The list goes on.

And the best thing about Twitter is that I can network with my friends there without having to skip dinner with my family, and my friends are always there even if I’m stuck in an airport waiting for a flight. It’s networking when you have time for networking, instead of every third Wednesday night at 6 pm at yet-another-hotel.

Of course, I do both. But now that the kids are older and need help with homework after school it’s nice to have alternatives. Thanks, Twitter!

And now, a word from the Twitterati – why do you use Twitter?