Business Strategy, Marketing, Sarasota, WordPress & More…
Author: David G. Johnson
I have owned and operated Grow The Dream in Sarasota, Florida since 1998. We are a strategic consulting firm focused on small to mid-size organizations, and we specialize in making things grow!
No, I’m not yet convinced that it will kill Facebook. (Is that even possible?)
Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook
But the CNN Tech coverage of this week’s big announcement from Facebook gave an interesting air to Mark Zuckerberg’s view of where his pet project is headed.
First: the big announcement. Facebook now has video chat via Skype. While it does seem clear that they’ve been working on this for some time, it’s awfully interesting that the big announcement took place without much drama only 1 week after Google+ announced “Hangouts,” which includes group video chat. (Zuckerberg says group chat isn’t important right now since most Skype users only chat 1 on 1 via video.)
The second big announcement was apparently an afterthought: Zuckerberg confirmed that Facebook now has 750 million users.
But what seems most interesting to me about this coverage was the quote from Zuckerberg about Facebook. The CNN Tech coverage gave the impression that Zuckerberg and his Facebook pals have accomplished their big goals. Third parties will be developing new “features” for Facebook, rather than Facebook itself, Facebook isn’t afraid of Google+, etc.
One quote, in particular, stood out to me. I had to look elsewhere for the entire sentence just to be sure I wasn’t misunderstanding it.
“Social networking is at an inflection point,” he said. “Mostly it was about connecting people and there was still this question about whether social networking was going to be this widespread, ubiquitous service in the world. That chapter is more or less done at this point.”
This is certainly lifted out of context, but really… what does he mean? It certainly left me wondering if Facebook has reached a point where they feel like they can sit back and relax.
“You can have anything in life you want, if you’ll just help enough other people get what they want.”
-Zig Ziglar
This is one of my favorite quotes from the master motivator and sales trainer. (And I think I share that sentiment with lots of other people!)
We use this quote often when speaking to audiences and training business people in the art & science of getting the message about their products and services out to the right people. It’s been my observation that people don’t buy what they “need,” in most cases… they buy what they want.
So… understanding what the right people (those who are likely to be your future buyers) really want and finding away to get it to them is a key business philosophy.
But at the heart of this quote is something far simpler and more valuable: a philosophy of service.
All the great business people — regardless of the size of their employee rosters or the number of zeros at the end of their annual revenue numbers — have always striven for this. Ultimately, those who serve best win.
“Mow-Wow” was how I always knew her. The story goes that my brother (who was her first grandchild) invented the moniker for her as a toddler, and it simply stuck. She was a loving, devoted Grandmother to me, who frequently had a mischievous gleam in her eye and was always quick with a remark and a hearty laugh.
But behind the spunky exterior was a quiet strength that was born in her large-family upbringing on a farm in rural Oklahoma. Her German-speaking grandparents left difficult circumstances in Russia and landed in Nebraska. Her parents married and eventually made their way to a new homestead outside of Weatherford, Oklahoma, where they started a family, eventually having 10 children.
The community in Weatherford was a tight-knit, family-oriented one. As it became more & more likely for World War II to impact the United States, she took a job with the War Department in Washington, D.C., which eventually led to her meeting the young Marine who stole her heart. The story goes that she actually dated his friend, but he snagged her. They fell in love and were married in September, 1945, once he returned from the Pacific theater at the end of the war.
They started their life together in Georgia, where he attended college and entered the ministry. She lived the majority of her adult life as a Pastor’s wife, caring for people and contributing her myriad skills to the congregational life and activities in churches across Oklahoma, eventually settling in Denver, Colorado.
Mow-Wow demonstrated a tremendous amount of diligence in her life. Some of my earliest memories of her involve her sitting at the breakfast table in their Littleton, Colorado home, praying for each & every family member by name and poring over the Scriptures. It seemed she was always memorizing passages from her beloved Bible, and if I walked by her, I would frequently hear her “muttering” the Scriptures under her breath. She lived & breathed the Word of God.
She raised 3 incredibly gifted and talented children, one of which thankfully became my Mother. All of her children have tremendous musical abilities, and I’m a grateful beneficiary of the disciplines that were part of her household where music lessons are concerned. Her children are all 3 accomplished pianists and music lovers. We are a very musical family, and I believe in large part we owe it to Mow-Wow’s determination to cultivate those abilities.
I’m grateful for so many experiences with her in my life. As a boy, I learned Scriptures from her and always enjoyed visits to her home. She was a hard-working homemaker, an amazing cook, and a joy to be around… although not without the occasional cantankerous moment. I was so grateful when she & Pa-Po decided to make the move to Florida in 1998 and spend their twilight years here. It has meant that my Mom’s side of the family has spent significant amounts of time together, which I’ve been very blessed to be part of along the way.
Unfortunately, she had a late-night fall 2 years ago, which resulted in a broken femur. The surgery to repair the break was a little hard for her to recover from, and she had a further setback when she had a stroke in the recovery process. My Grandfather had been by her side through her major heart surgery several years prior, and was always strong for her. But after her fall and subsequent stroke, his own health began to decline. He passed away in January, 2010, just a few days shy of his 89th birthday. She lived to reach her own 89th birthday in April of this year, but was tired from her health struggles.
She was greatly loved and will be sorely missed.
A public viewing will be held on Thursday, May 12th, from 6pm-8pm at Brown and Sons Funeral Home, 604 43rd Street West, Bradenton, FL 34209 (map here). A funeral service celebrating the life of Erma L. Carroll will be held on Friday, May 13th at 11am at the same location. She will be interred at the Sarasota National Cemetary at 2:30pm.
My favorite independent Sarasota coffee shop is currently featured as a Tampa Bay Area Groupon deal! Just wanted to give a quick heads-up to my Sarasota readers who are also coffee connoisseurs. Spend $6, and get $12 worth of stuff on your next visit. Here’s the Groupon deal. Get it now: it expires today!
While they also sell & service espresso machines (residential & commercial), their cafe on Bee Ridge has been a welcome addition since they opened last year. Great-tasting food, free wi-fi and lots of beverage options make The Beanz Man a fantastic choice. And, as we’ve mentioned before, they make the ultimate Almond cappuccino. Be sure & tell ’em I sent ya!
This morning I made the startling discovery that an important WordPress site belonging to one of our clients had been hacked.
A Little History
If you’ve heard me speak in the last 5 years, you know that I’m a huge believer in the power of content marketing. We regularly recommend and teach business blogging basics to our clients. We have no desire to turn them into bloggers per se, but we’ve trained them that producing fresh, high quality content is a fantastic way to achieve visibility online and even provide fodder for social media outlets like Facebook & Twitter.
So… one of our clients who hired us to build out their WordPress site and for whom we’ve provided a fair amount of training and coaching for some time now began to experience a decline in search engine rankings. In their case, WordPress is installed on a separate domain from their main website. Their main website was historically not performing well from a search engine point of view (although it was great from virtually every other perspective when it was built), so WordPress was being used as a way to help prop up the main site. And it worked. Really, really well.
Imagine my surprise, then, when this particular site began to drop in the rankings for no apparent reason. Nothing had changed that we could tell. We did a little research and paid attention to what the competitors were doing and could see nothing significant enough to account for the change. It was very much an anomaly, because all of our other clients who were doing what we trained them to do were doing just fine.
So today, quite by accident, we found the culprit.
The WPRef Plugin
We were reviewing a piece of content before it got published when we discovered that a couple of the links had a rel=”nofollow” attribute. The content writer who was working on it had no knowledge of how to manually create that type of link (we certainly don’t train people to do that… especially for links that are created intentionally for search engine purposes!), so we knew something was up.
I inquired a little further to find out where the link had come from, and the answer was, “I copied it from another post.”
Hmmmm…. well… I assumed at first that something had crept its way into an earlier post and perhaps it had been duplicated a couple of times. I wasn’t looking forward to hunting down the original link. As I heard someone say recently, it’s like looking for a needle in a needlestack! But then I noticed that there was more than one link acting that way. So… I used the WordPress “preview” function to take a look at how the new post would look, and decided to “view source code” to see if the changes I’d made were taking effect.
That’s when I noticed this:
Every link within the content had been modified with a and a rel=”nofollow” sitewide.
That would be a problem. The site’s being running for a while and there was a significant amount of content.
Digging a little deeper, I found that a plugin had been installed and given the name “WPRef”
We had backed up and upgraded the site to the latest version of WordPress on February 3rd. So… we checked our backup and found that the plugin was not contained in it. On the server, we found (via FTP) that a file called “wpref.php” had been copied to the /wp-content/plugins folder on February 10th.
Not only had the plugin been placed in that folder, it had been activated.
Checking a little deeper, we discovered that the plugin’s only function was to add a tag and a “nofollow” attribute to every outbound link in the site’s content.
This amounts to a very specific, malicious attack. The only purpose of it can be to cause Google (and other search engines too) to ignore the site’s links.
Needless to say, I was infuriated. We’ve taken steps to harden that particular site. All my searching and other efforts to find evidence that others have encountered a hack like this have turned up nothing. It appears that (at least for now) this is a one-off, one-shot hack job. It’s hard not to believe that this site was specifically targeted on purpose.
The amusing thing was that the plugin added an options panel into the “Settings” menu. Within that, it output a bunch of gibberish, including some Russion domain names.  In the “Active Plugins” area, it purported to have “code.google.com” as its “plugin site” and its author was listed as, “Sergei Brin.” I was so distracted by the infuration and frustration of the whole thing that I failed to recognize that it wasn’t just a Russian-sounding name to match the other Russian references… it’s the (botched) name of the famous Google co-founder.
Humorous.
So… we’ve saved a copy of this little piece of php code. Obviously, we’ve removed it from the site in question and have tested the site out. Our links are back to normal now. Presumably, this client’s search engine rankings will return back to their prior positioning. Actually, since the rankings were declining, we’ve stepped up the game for this client with some additional efforts and so the rankings should actually move higher than ever. So… if this was, in fact, a malicious attack which singled out this particular business… the plan has backfired.
**Update** The BarCamp Sarasota Fall 2011 event takes place October 15-16 at GWIZ. Epiphany Marketing is making presentations there as well. We hope to see you!
I’m writing this from inside an Entrepreneurial Roundtable session being facilitated by locally-based technologist Stan Schultes. The ideas being generated within this “open source” group of people are absolutely stellar. There are folks in the room who have been there, done it, and are looking for an opportunity to share back and forth.
This is just one example of the benefits of having an event like BarCamp Sarasota. This year’s event is being held this weekend at GWIZ, which turns out to be a perfect venue because of their various small rooms that seem ideally suited for sessions like those you’ll find at a BarCamp event. The sessions are on a wide variety of topics — both technology-focused and otherwise. Skimming through upcoming session for today, here are some of the topics on the menu:
“Leadership and Community Building, Why Now More than Ever?” with Sara Hand
“The Zen of Building Sustainable Technology” with Lorrie Vervoordt
“Programming Humans” with  Tracy Ingram
“Facebook Marketing & SEO” with Thao Tran
At 11am, we’ll be presenting…
Making It All Pay: Growing Your Business with 21st Century Tools
Yes… technology is great! We love it… but without a comprehensive, written, measurable strategy in place, most every business will find themselves floundering in a sea of unfinished initiatives — nearly all of which have failed to produce any significant result from a business standpoint.
For example… how many businesses have websites, blogs, Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, etc. but can’t point to any new business that they have produced? Or (perhaps worse) know that some business has been produced, but the metrics aren’t in place to identify how much and from which initiatives.
So… we’ll be talking about the strategy piece of the equation… and lining up all the elements in a way that gets you the result you desire. For most businesses, this means new customers, bigger  market share and long-term profitability.
Hope you join us for our session… More reports from this year’s BarCamp event later!
We were thrilled to be able to work on a “fresh” project for Christian Family Church Sarasota. They’re launching a brand new Saturday evening meeting time beginning March 26th, 2011 and wanted to get the word out in an innovative way.
They already had planned to do a postcard mailing, so we worked together with Lead Pastor Warren McGregor, who is also an entrepreneur and business owner, to create an integrated campaign that would provide people with the opportunity to get a “taste” of Christian Family Church. When the postcard arrives, the recipients are invited to visit a website created specifically for this campaign called Spring Clean Your Life.
Once there, the visitor has an opportunity to receive 3 downloads:
a free MP3 containing a 10-minute message from Entrepreneur & Lead Pastor, Warren McGregor, entitled “Fresh Start”
a voucher redeemable for a free meal for the entire family from CFC’s amazing International Bistro, and
a coupon good for 30% off any purchase from the CFC Cafe Bookstore, which offers a variety of books, CDs and resources for a successful life
In addition to the postcard, the SpringCleanYourLife.org website (along with the special offers) will also be promoted through the CFC Facebook page and Twitter account.
One final touch is that the Church’s sign, which sits on Clark Road (just east of Beneva Road) in Sarasota, is being updated with a fresh new look that ties in with the postcard, website and Spring Clean Your Life theme.
A Personal Note About Christian Family Church Sarasota
My family and I have been thrilled to be connected with Pastors Warren & Kathrine McGregor and the entire CFC Sarasota family since late last summer. This project has been a great way to help create some awareness for the community in Sarasota about the jewel we have here in CFC.
CFC features energetic music along with positive, inspiring & motivating messages in a family atmosphere. There are a variety of special-interest activities available for every age group, including some powerful high-impact items like global humanitarian outreach (I just returned from a highly productive trip to Haiti with a group from CFC and medical missions organization, Hearts Afire).
Whether or not you receive a postcard, I encourage you to check out CFC and visit a weekend meeting… either on Saturdays at 7pm or Sundays at 10:30am (starting the weekend of the 26th & 27th). You can learn more at the Christian Family Church Sarasota website.
Ok… admit it. You’ve done it. We all do it. You’ve probably done it lately.
C’mon… tell me…
“How often do you Google yourself?”
Well it’s fun to see where you rank. But if you own a business, it’s critical today to rank #1 on your own name. If you serve a local market, you should at least rank #1 on your own name in your city.
However, as I’ve pointed out again and again to audiences all over the globe when speaking… ranking on your own name isn’t really marketing. It’s customer service. (Ok… it’s also brand protection, which is a marketing function, but let’s not get nit-picky here.)
What Are Your Customers Searching For?
A far more useful idea, however, is to rank #1 (or at least near the top) in Google and those other search engines on phrases that likely buyers will use when they’re searching for the stuff you sell.
For example, if you happened to be looking for a place to eat out in my city (I live and work in the paradise known as Sarasota, Florida), you might run a search like:
“fondue Sarasota”
or
“buffalo wings Sarasota”
Admittedly, you probably aren’t real likely to run both of those searches on the same day… For a nice evening out, my wife and I really enjoy fondue together. And I personally can’t seem to drag her kicking and screaming to a wings joint (happens maybe once every 2-3 years), so I go there for lunch when possible with friends that enjoy hot wings… since one of the local places is my favorite restaurant in the entire world!
But I digress…let me get to the point.
“Why Haven’t They Contacted Me Yet?”
If you happen to be the owner (or manager) of, say…
Dylan’s Fondue Fusion
The Melting Pot
Wings N Things
Wings N Weenies
…don’t you think you would contact the marketing firm that owns the website that ranks #1 in Google on the above searches?
For the record, I never really set out to rank #1 on those terms. I just happen to have decided randomly one day to write about those topics. And I happen to know what tools to use to market a local business! And I happen to use those tools myself… so… rankings happen.
You know they’re running those Google searches from time to time, right? I mean seriously… you need to know where your business ranks on those kinds of terms. And you would want (I would think) to do everything in your power to make sure that you had good positioning… so…
In case you’re wondering… yes, we help businesses with search engine rankings. But as I recently pointed out on our small business marketing blog, rankings are only a piece of the puzzle. More importantly, we train small businesses how to be their own best marketers so that they can consistently attract customers in cost-effective ways — both online and offline.
Now… if you’re in a critical situation and need rapid help with the results you’re getting from your website, our website performance assessment is a great place to start.
Update (December 17, 2010), you can now hear Carl tell the story for yourself in this PRP Sarasota video.
I recently spoke to a newly-retired Sarasota resident who had found himself facing knee surgery.
After enduring numerous treatments — starting with cortisone shots and progressing from there — he was experiencing additional symptoms in his knee. And his “good” knee was beginning the same decline. The result? He walked with a limp, couldn’t climb stairs, and was slowing down significantly.
Remarkably, after hearing all about his knee problems, this guy did a happy dance in front of me. No really… he danced. And quite vigorously, too!
This guy was dancing for 2 reasons:
He had saved a bunch of money avoiding surgery, and…
He had avoided surgery.
Did I mention he didn’t need surgery anymore?
Oh… and the other reason he was dancing: he had no pain in his knees!
Medically speaking, this gentleman had experienced regenerative healing. When you have new tissue growth and repair, there’s no need to go under the knife!
How did it happen?
3 words: Platelet Rich Plasma. Or in 3 letters: PRP.
Dr. Kassicieh with some Platelet Rich Plasma equipment in his Sarasota office.
How Platelet Rich Plasma (PRP) Works
It turns out our bodies have amazing healing abilities. (Who knew?) But sometimes situations deteriorate in places where it’s hard to get the healing ability of the human body to function. So… in a simple outpatient procedure that literally takes minutes to complete, Dr. Dan Kassicieh draws blood from the patient, works a little magic (not the medical term), and re-injects the resulting soup right at the point where your body needs some healing.
This treatment happens on a completely outpatient basis in Dr. Kassicieh’s office on Cattlemen Road. And although it’s relatively pain-free (the gentleman I spoke to didn’t feel any pain during the procedure at all) and is quick, perhaps the best benefit of all is that you get to skip the recovery time associated with surgery!
The “magic” I referred to earlier involves spinning the blood drawn from the patient in order to separate the platelets from other components. The platelets are then mixed with some other stuff (bioactive proteins, I’m told, among other things) and the super-concentrated healing liquid gets expertly injected at just the right point.
From there, the platelets and proteins act as a catalyst — triggering an amazing healing response from the patient’s own body. Actual new tissue is created as a result.
The procedure isn’t right for every situation, but for most people suffering from joint pain, sports-related and other injuries, and a variety of other painful conditions, PRP is a fantastic way to avoid surgery and narcotics.
If you’re interested in learning more, you can visit Dr. Kassicieh’s PRP Sarasota website, check out this Platelet Rich Plasma Sarasota video on YouTube… or call Sarasota Neurology at (941) 955-5858.
Those who know me well — and shoot… even those who read this blog! — know that I’m a Starbucks fan. I carry the Gold card, I’ve unlocked the Foursquare “Barista Badge,” and I’ve had Starbucks almond cappuccinos on multiple continents.
However… in the famous revamping of 2008, Starbucks ditched a few of my favorite things. Some of them hit a little closer to home than others. The loss of the Bearista left me with one less source for cute little stuffed animals to bring home to my wife and daughter. That hurt. Thankfully, the Bearista is back this fall.
What hurt even worse, however, and what is not back… is Starbucks almond syrup. My eulogy to this personal favorite continues to bring visitors from all over the world to this site.
Starbucks has a consistent product… all over the world. That makes it worth counting on… no matter where you are.
However, since the demise of their almond syrup, I’ve taken to checking out local, independent coffee shops to see what treasures I might discover — especially here in Sarasota, Florida. Consequently, I’ve found that there are some places around town that produce some fantastic products. LeLu Coffee Lounge on Siesta Key is one such place. In fact, they make a mocha using genuine Ghirardelli syrup that makes my wife melt. +1 for LeLu!
But just yesterday I believe I may have discovered Nirvana. No… not the Kurt Cobain-fronted grunge band from the 90s. But the real deal… the ultimate almond Cappuccino. And it doesn’t smell like Teen Spirit!
Locals here in Sarasota may recall the name, “The Beanz Man.” We knew it as a dealer of a wide variety of personal and professional espresso machines. When their shop disappeared from North Washington Boulevard, I thought perhaps it was another casualty of the economic times, so to speak.
Turns out, they suffered a devastating fire. I don’t know the details, but apparently it forced them to relocate and start over. Imagine my surprise when I spotted their vans parked in the parking lot next door to my office on Bee Ridge Road a few months ago!
Well… not only did they move… but last week they opened a full-fledged cafe! They serve a variety of sandwiches and soups. I walked over to it for lunch yesterday with my wonderful wife, Jill, and had a prosciutto and fontina sandwich that was spectacular.
But… what do you get when you take an espresso machine dealer… one who probably knows the ins and outs of making espresso-based drinks as well as anyone else… and put him in his very own cafe?
You get the handmade cappuccino of your life… with the perfect amount of almond syrup to boot! (At least… that’s what you get if you’re me! You might order something else… that, I recognize. But that would be your loss.)
Actually… I’m sure that any espresso-based drink you could possibly dream up would be amazing at The Beanz Man Espresso Bar Cafe. Here’s a sure thing: I’ll be walking next door more often… a lot more often. Check out the cafe page on their website to download yourself a coupon, then head on over there yourself. Enjoy something to munch on at one of their nifty little cafe tables, or sink down into the cozy couch and fire up your favorite wi-fi device to do some surfing.
Making It All Pay: Growing Your Business with 21st Century Tools
