We like to view the world in black and white, good and bad, friend and foe. But as industry lines blur,
such clear distinctions become even more difficult to see within our
complex reality. This creates an opportunity for those willing to seize
it. You can befriend enemies.
Vistaprint, the printing giant that I started covering last week, is actively doing this. The company basically deals with four types of competitors:
1.Traditional printers, like Consolidated Graphics
2.Office supply retailers like Staples, OfficeMax, and even FedEx Office (formerly Kinkos) with on-site print stations that serve small businesses
3.Home
printing by small businesses that can buy new workstations from
Hewlett-Packard and other computer companies and print on an as-needed
basis
4.Other small technology start-ups that offer competing services
Vistaprint’s
management has found a way to deal with each competitor to ensure its
own success. By keeping a close eye on the small tech companies, it
also uses its scale – two massive printing plants in the U.S. and
Europe – to achieve economies of scale that are difficult for start-ups
to match.
Similarly, it pays attention to emerging home printing technologies. By offering better pricing and better quality than at-home print jobs, Vistaprint takes the guess work, effort and time out of preparing professional marketing pieces for small businesses.
To compete with OfficeMax and its peers, Vistaprint has adjusted its strategy to become helpful. These local, on-site companies seem to be the biggest threat to Vistaprint’s small business target audience, so Vistaprint’s management has used an unorthodox approach to maintain and grow its market share.
Instead of taking these companies head on and trying to attack their turf, Vistaprint has offered a lending hand to its competitors. It has signed agreements with many of these companies to offer Vistaprint’s services as a white label service.
That
means when you go to such stores you may find a kiosk, branded as that
retailer’s own service, that allows customers to design and print
business cards, folders, and other products. But what you do not see is
that Vistaprint is the one taking that order, preparing the files and running the printing jobs. You don’t know it, but you are actually using Vistaprint services.
This is helpful to OfficeMax
and its peers because it allows them to quickly provide a competitive
service at a lower cost. But it also preempts potential competition. As
Wendy Cebula, Vistaprint’s president of North America, explained to me,
“One chunk of the market will be taken by OfficeMax, OfficeDepot, and
the like. But we have partnerships with OfficeMax and FedEx Office and
also with Viking (Office Depot's EU division) … one way for competitors
to get into our space is to partner with Kinkos. So it’s great offense and great defense.”
The
traditional printers operate from an older view of competition and so
naturally adopt patterns of competitive behavior that are fundamentally
different than Vistaprint’s. Where they see scale, Vistaprint sees technology. Where they see direct competition, Vistaprint befriends an enemy. By blending black and white, Vistaprint creates a huge gray space of powerful competitive advantage.
Ask yourself the questions below to see how you can develop an unexpected advantage by befriending a foe.
1.Who are my direct and my indirect competitors?
2.What do we produce that is different or better?
3.Is there a way to share information, products or services with an indirect competitor to attack a direct competitor?
4.Is one of my direct competitors a company that can help mine?
5.How could I partner with my strongest competitors take over our industry?
Boards of directors, comprised of volunteers, have the decision-making authority and power over the direction and finances of nonprofit organizations. Although there are boards that are disappointingly ineffective, I have seen many boards rise to the occasion to lead their organizations to success in service to the community.
The first nonprofit board that asked me to help them with a complete overhaul was a community based nonprofit that served a large immigrant population helping people with language skills, adults with job training and placement, children with after-school care and homework, and families with social services. That was in the 1990's. Since then, I have assisted dozens of nonprofits--regional as well as global--in building stronger boards and establishing the leadership they need to advance strategically and financially to serve the community.
The impetus for change is often financial distress, especially in today's environment with cutbacks in government funding and philanthropy. But some boards and nonprofit executives seek to transform their boards simply because they are proactive. They recognize opportunities for fees for services, collaboration and alliances with other organizations, and innovation in addressing vital matters in education, healthcare, poverty, social justice, the environment, and others areas. They realize that the only way for an organization to advance is to build a strong board with excellent leadership.
How do boards drive change? Change always requires a few drivers, and it takes more than the chief executive of the nonprofit. It takes at least a couple of board members and possibly a funder or two for there to be enough traction to push for change. Then, together with a qualified board consultant, the change-agents can transform the board into a high functioning body.
What's an effective board look like? The board chair is working in partnership (see "the leadership partnership") with the nonprofit's chief executive to lead a group of passionate board members from diverse backgrounds and perspectives to
Affirm, and if necessary, update the mission to ensure that the organization is providing compelling value in service to the community
Create and help to achieve the revenue model for success--and for nonprofits, the revenue model is usually a patchwork of revenue sources, which might include government funds, philanthropic resources, as well as fees for services
Focus board agendas--and the work in between board meetings--in helping the organization to achieve strategic and financial success, including through oversight, and fundraising
Establish board member expectations and a system of accountability
Build the board with people who have the variety of experiences, skills, and networks to help advance the organization, including people with leadership potential
Establish a cadre of board leaders who have the diversity of backgrounds, the experience, and the qualities to lead, while also creating a pipeline of potential new leaders for the future
Provide opportunities for continuous board education on governance, fundraising, and matters of substance related to the work of the organization
The nonprofit sector is not an abstract concept; rather, it is the sum of nonprofit boards. The boards hold the power to make the world a better place. And, it's actually quite doable to help boards become more effective, one board at a time.
About four or five years ago, when everyone started launching corporate blogs, a lot of people (myself included) thought it was OK to just use it as a medium to post press releases, without a lot of context. Like the scrunchie, that guy I dated sophomore year, and stirrup pants, this goes down in history as one of those “What was I thinking?” moments.
People say hindsight is always 20/20, but why didn’t I at least add some insight, like a Q&A with the CEO or a customer review, to accompany the press release? Maybe I was hoping that my extreme lack of creativity would have the opposite effect on people, making them think I was a genius. The “Modern Art” effect, if you will, similar to hanging a beer can on a wall and selling it to the Guggenheim. Thank god people (hopefully myself included) have evolved.
The best blogs make you forget that they’re coming from a company. One great example is Seventh Generation’s blog, which only periodically mentions their company, but never too overtly. Instead, they focus on information that their ideal “conscious consumer” would want to know about. In an entirely different league is their executive chairman Jeff Hollender’s blog, The Inspired Protagonist, which essentially provides mini-editorials and timely reactions to breaking news. His writing is smart but still accessible.
I’ve been getting a lot of comic relief from The Onion lately, and thought, how else to portray the aforementioned “What was I thinking” moment but with a press release?
PRESS RELEASE: INTATECH BLOG READERS HAIL ERICA SALAMIDA AS THE GROUNDBREAKING LEADING PROVIDER OF WRITING SOLUTIONS FOR THE CORPORATE WORLD
BOSTON, MA—NOVEMBER 12, 2005—Erica Salamida, the most creative person in the world, has found a groundbreaking new medium for distributing press releases – the corporate blog. Akin to the safety precaution announcement that precedes every passenger flight, the blog is the perfect medium to broadcast mission-critical information to a near-imprisoned audience.
“Erica Salamida’s press releases have made me an Intatech blog reader for life,” said John Salamida, who is in no way related to Erica, and definitely not her dad. “Who would have been so smart as to post press releases with absolutely no setup to a corporate blog, which clearly everyone who would want to purchase an Intatech product would read. My daughter – I mean – this person who I don’t know but think is a genius, is a game changer.”
On week 15 of the Intatech blog, when the press release was first posted, readership soared from 15 to 19 people (not all of whom work at Intatech). Click-through rates to the products page also increased by 56 percent, and not just from Erica clicking on the product link to make sure it worked 56 times.
“I’m thrilled to see that Erica is posting press releases like a banshee on our corporate blog,” said Karen Smith, CEO of Innatech. “We literally have no idea what else to write on that thing, and we wanted to make sure the rest of our industry wasn’t looking at us as followers because we didn’t have a blog. Thank God someone is there to post things and populate content. [Ken – why don’t we get the Dunkin Donuts coffee in the office instead of this generic crap!] Sorry, I was saying…yes, the blog is great. ”
Anyway, GUILTY as charged, let’s move on and pretend this never happened. What other great corporate blogs, or fatal mistakes, have you seen?
California is at it again. State regulators just set energy efficiency standards for new TVs, mostly the big flat panel models that gulp kilowatts. As a result, consumers will save about $8 billion in the next decade in the form of lower electricity bills and carbon pollution will drop equal to removing 100,000 cars from the road. As my dad used to say, “a penny saved is a penny earned” - - so why doesn’t the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) want you to get your share of that saved carbon or those 800,000,000,000 pennies?
The CEA fears that TV makers won’t be able to add more bells and whistles to future products, because such features might draw too much additional power. Given that I can already download every show, movie, and video game ever made - - and control my entertainment center without leaving the couch - - what else would next generation TVs do for me? Make and deliver the popcorn?
In fact, if past is prologue, this new regulation will drive innovation and exciting new technologies that can be adapted into other products. Past California energy efficiency mandates have not only made Californians 40% more energy and carbon efficient than average Americans, they have also inspired the invention of things like laser printing, a process that is now used to “print” layers of materials onto thin film for making new transparent solar panels.
In response to California energy efficiency mandates that were first promulgated in the 1970s, companies like Hewlett-Packard designed the inkjet printer and within a decade were essentially printing money by selling the new technology to both businesses and consumers. After seeing them in action, Nobel Prize winning chemist Alan Heeger figured out that you could use the same process to combine thin layers of compounds that together create electricity when exposed to light. Now companies like Konarka and Energy Conversion Devices (NASDAQ: ENER) are printing their money on rooftops - - laminating solar panels, the thickness of human hair, onto products like roof tiles and windows, turning entire buildings into solar energy power plants.
And this time, the energy misers in the Golden State are not alone in saving those pennies - - the new TV regulations were supported by California’s investor owned utilities (IOUs), including PG&E, Sempra, and Edison International, because it’s good for their bottom lines. To reduce pollution and carbon, the state Public Utility Commission has long rewarded utilities for investing in energy efficiency. Watch now for those IOUs to offer money to consumers to scrap old inefficient TVs (just as they now pay to scrap your old refrigerator or clothes dryer), because it reduces their need to build new power plants and actually increases their profits. They will likely earn billions more in valuable carbon credits when the western carbon market is launched in 2012 from those investments.
Yes, as Senator Dirksen used to say, “a billion here and a billion there and suddenly you’re talking real money.” If he were alive today, he’d be reminding us of that maxim - - beamed into our living rooms on a new energy and carbon efficient TV.
The green entrepreneurs I speak with every day have great stories to tell about their phenomenal work saving resources, cleaning our energy, and creating a better world.These stories do more than entertain; they get attention and bring in business.Telling your story is one thing, but making sure that it’s heard is another.Tools ranging from PR to Twitter can deliver your message, each with their pros and cons, and services like 3BL Media can amplify your story to reach more eyeballs and get noticed.
The first step is paring down your message to be crystal clear, making it as short and simple as possible. The value of clarity is often overlooked; clarity helps the message to stick, and also helps entrepreneurs to better understand their own business.
The next step is finding tools to deliver the message to the right eyes and ears.The tools to boost your business visibility include:
Blogging – Blogging doesn’t cost anything and can connect you to large numbers of people, but it does take time and it’s not for everyone.For blogging to attract an audience you need to post frequently, probably at least once a week.This may not sound like much, but the entrepreneurs I know are incredibly busy people.
Social networking –Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube are free and potentially powerful ways of making connections, but they are also full of noise.The great hope is that your post will go viral, taking on a life of its own, but your content will usually need a big push to stand out and get noticed.
Partnering with media distributors – If you already have content and want it to reach more people, services like 3BL Media amplify your message through high profile distribution to a big chunk of the CSR world.
Ads – Ads on the internet can be highly targeted based on demographics of websites.An ad campaign does cost money, and the time to keep an eye on what is working, and not working.
Public relations – PR can be immensely powerful; getting others in the media to talk about you can provide credibility.It usually takes connections and time to make this happen, and the efforts of a paid professional.
For entrepreneurs working on tight budgets, free tools like blogging, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook can be very attractive.Small businesses are often so focused on their business and so cash strapped these days that they have little money for marketing.Free social networking tools can accomplish a lot and should be used as much as possible, but they can’t always do the whole job on their own.Public relations efforts provide a big boost with the right investment of time and money, although some businesses find it’s more than they can invest today.
That’s where media services like 3BL Media comes in, providing a low cost way for green businesses to reach out and grab the attention of the CSR community and beyond.To accomplish this, 3BL Media has assembled a network of media channels including opt-in subscribers, blogs, Reuter’s Project Insider, affiliate websites, the CSR Minute, and video feeds.Altogether their network reaches hundreds of thousands or even millions of people.It can be a powerful way to boost your signal, and I’ve recently partnered with 3BL to help small businesses get noticed even with the constrained budgets they are often faced with today.
No matter what approach you take, your story still has to be a good one to capture the imagination, but with a clear message, a compelling story, and the right strategy to tell it, your business efforts can be amplified many fold.You have little to lose by getting your story heard, and quite a lot to gain.
About Glenn Croston:Glenn Croston is the founder of StartingUpGreen.com, helping businesses to start and grow green. The Green Biz Blast produced by Starting Up Green connects those selling and seeking green. He is also the author of "75 Green Businesses You Can Start to Make Money and Make a Difference", and the author of "Starting Green: An Ecopreneur’s Toolkit for Starting a Green Business from Business Plan to Profits", a nuts and bolts guidebook.
To understand how Vistaprint has become the world’s leading provider of printing services to small businesses, you need a brief overview of the printing industry.
People
buy printing services because of price, convenience, and quality. They
can easily compare printing companies across these dimensions. And
because printing companies depend on the same suppliers for printing
technology, they eventually all look the same.
Winning this game has come to depend on scale. He who prints more and can offer a lower price and capture more profit. Other than that, commonly accepted wisdom says there are few opportunities to establish a sustainable edge over others.
It
is precisely when industry players and experts have arrived at such a
conclusion that innovators can seize the advantage. When your
competitors think they have the answers they stop questioning how to
do things better. When they settle on “best practices,” when you hear
them say “this is the way things are done,” or “it has worked this way
for years,” at that moment there may exist an opportunity to disrupt
your market by breaking the accepted rules.
As
it turns out, Vistaprint’s founder, Robert Keane, was a rule breaker.
Keane applied a key strategy to find that unattainable competitive
advantage. He refused to believe that printing is mostly a commodity
business that one can only win with scale and customer service.
Instead, Keane decided to focus on process innovation.
Coordinate to Rise Above the Competition
At the core of the Vistaprint strategy is a seemingly straightforward process innovation.
This innovation broke an accepted rule traditional printers had assumed
was insurmountable: the cost of printing the short run jobs that small
businesses demanded was too expensive for small businesses to afford.
Since
printing economics are high on fixed costs – it costs as much to set up
a machine to print 150,000 business cards as it does to print 1,000 –
printers would have to charge exorbitant rates to the small businesses
that wanted to fulfill small orders.
So Vistaprint changed the process. It built software that only required print jobs to have the same physical format, which means they were the same size and paper type. Then they laid the appropriate individual business designs over a large, table-sized piece of print paper, as if it were one run. By
doing this, Vistaprint is able to print a thousand sheets deep, cut
them into separate stacks and serve multiple clients at once.
For instance, when Vistaprint runs a business card job, it prints a thousand sheets deep and cuts them into 143 stacks. That allowsthem to print 143 individual designs 1,000 pages deep. That is equivalent to printing 143,000 business cards in one fell swoop.
This insight derives its power from a natural principle: when
you coordinate uncoordinated things they become new, bigger things.
When birds fly in formation they become a flock, fish become schools,
buffalo become herds. Ask
yourself the questions below to see how you can coordinate something
that will change the status quo and allow you to work at a higher
level.
1.What is the accepted way of doing things? What are the industry rules?
2.Are there efficiency gaps in the traditional process?
3.Is there a new product or service that my company can offer to shake up the market?
4.Is there a way to use current infrastructure or technology to offer this new service or product?
Having trained and placed many business executives on nonprofit boards for over 15 years, I've also helped board members decide when it's time to move on from one board to the next. What leads people to move off of one board and move onto a new one?
Ability to provide greater value: I find that most people are interested, and yes, even potentially passionate, about a number of issues. The major driving force in their interest in serving on one board over another is the opportunity to do something useful to help advance the mission. If you are just attending meetings and not able to make much of a difference, then explore with the board chair and the CEO of the organization how you might be more useful, whether that's in fundraising, board-building, financial investments, assisting with the audit committee, strategic planning, or some other way. If you and the board and organization's leadership don't find a good way for you to do something meaningful, then it's time to move on.
Learning about an issue of importance: Sometimes, people decide after several years on a board that they want to stretch themselves to learn about a new issue of importance, and new board experiences can provide such opportunities. I know a terrific board member who rotates boards every six years in order to develop her knowledge of regional and global issues; during her six years at each organization, she is a valued board member, serving in leadership positions--giving, fundraising, and board-building.
Being appreciated: Board members will gravitate to nonprofits where they and their friends, clients, and bosses will be appropriately thanked and recognized for their gifts of time and money. If you're not appreciated, move on.
Serving on a board is an opportunity to learn and grow while you are helping to advance a mission you truly believe in and thus serving the community. While it's meaningful and fulfilling, and you are adding value, keep going. Otherwise, there are plenty of boards that need people who are generous with their business talents and their funds.
Now more than ever, individuals, corporations, and foundations want to make informed choices when they make financial contributions to nonprofit organizations. And people want to volunteer where their time and talents will be put to good use. So how do you know which organizations to support?
A valuable print resource since 2003, the Catalogue for Philanthropy: Greater Washington went online tonight. "We offer a wide variety of giving options, including a gift registry and gift cards," according to Barbara Harman, President and Editor, CFP-DC, and Executive Director, Harman Family Foundation.
Beyond making financial contributions, individuals can have the highest impact in helping to move nonprofits to higher levels of performance by joining the board of directors. And having trained and "matched" hundreds of business executives in finding the right boards of directors to serve on, I strongly advise any individual to go in with their eyes open before committing to join any board. The Catalogue for Philanthropy is the best resource I've seen for people to begin researching nonprofits that are doing valuable work in the community.
I've also assisted businesses in establishing productive, high impact CSR programs; one aspect of the process is identifying nonprofits that can be potential partners on the ground. The Catalogue is a uniquely useful resource for such purposes.
"The Catalogue features just over 300 nonprofits that have been carefully vetted by 90 expert reviewers from foundations large and small, corporate philanthropy programs, giving circles, DC government agencies, and individuals," explains Harman.
Kudos to Barbara Harman and Kathy Jankowski, Director of Partnerships and Business Development, CFP-DC, for their vision and execution. Your work is helping people and institutions seeking to engage in meaningful ways, as well as nonprofits that are doing important work.
People. You can't go out and have a good time in New York without money. And if you are starting up a blog or a social media / social network empire, you have two choices. Make it really big really fast and sell it off. Or, grow it with focus, niche-seeking content writers, and don't worry so much about advertising. Apparently, only 8% are reading it anyway.
I have found some information that would be useful for all the start-up entrepreneurs out there, who are increasingly growing education social networks that support the building of curriculum, lesson plans and digitally-enhanced teaching methods.
Internet advertising works extremely well in the context of a search engine. Many searches are intended to lead to transactions, so matching a paid ad to a query is sometimes a good user experience. Advertising can work well in the context of niche content – a website focused on cross-country skiing is a great place to advertise to cross-country skiers, and there’s a decent chance they’re going to be interested in learning about your ski wax. Ads on sites like Facebook work much less well, and while targeting those ads based on demographics may make them more effective, that targeting doesn’t fix the core problem: people are using social network sites to communicate, not to consume content, and they don’t want to be bothered by ads when they’re communicating.
The good news – for users annoyed by ads, not for advertisers – is that we appear to learn very quickly how to ignore online advertising. comScore, a company that monitors user behavior on the web for advertisers, reported in 2007 that only 32% of internet users clicked on banner ads in a given month. By 2009, that number had fallen to 16% of internet users, and that a core 8% of all internet users – “Natural Born Clickers” (yes, that’s what they called the studies) – are responsible for 85% of all banner clicks on the web.
Essentially, there are not enough new users available to come online and click on the banner ads, for instance, that advertisers use to generate interest and income / revenue.
Pay attention to Zuckerman.
He's on to something: people pay attention to what they love. Other people, not advertisers, are likely to pay for the data that erupts from that community collaboration.
I'm reminded of a couple of projects I worked on in Hong Kong. They dealt with marketing, advertising, and the use of participatory media or the focus of niche channels in traditional broadcasting to drive revenue and sales of goods and services.
Some companies in Asia have figured out that you have to link reputation of the blogger or the social network participant with the reputation of the product. [ed note: I focus on Asia, because that's what I know better] This is something that Coca-Cola does quite well in China. Also, Dell was very good at it. And so was Sina.com, China's largest web portal.
I wrote about this for Media Partners Asia in Hong Kong.
Jack O’Dwyer has been doing PR for 40 years, and he’s a well-known, albeit curmudgeonly, expert in the industry. In a recent interview with Dave Armand at PRSA, Jack denounced social media, saying that PR people’s jobs are to deal exclusively with the press. Likening PR people’s persuasion skills to a boxer’s fists, or “assault with a deadly weapon,” he suggested that they lay off citizen journalists altogether. Since then, a Twitter Intervention (or as I like to call it, a Twittervention) has sprung up against O’Dwyer, calling him “out of touch.”
I just had to get in on this O’Dwyer vs. Twittersphere sparring match – it’s too good to be left alone. Lots of PR people – in sustainability and other subject matter areas – deal directly with the public through twitter, blogs, and other forms of social media. Many would argue that PR people’s jobs hinge on this very ability to reach consumers (or whatever audience they’re trying to reach) directly.
So why do I have this nagging urge to get in O’Dwyer's corner on this one? Well, maybe I just think he’s “right with a caveat.”
A lot of bloggers out there are modern-day journalists – they’ve built a huge following, and maybe they even made money off of their blogs from advertisers (Think GreenBiz or TechCrunch). For these sites, blogger contact information is listed, and they reach an audience that’s important to my clients. By Jack’s definition (journalists = experts), even though he didn’t say it, I think he would agree with me.
Other bloggers are just doing it for fun. For example, I have a food blog that I write in my free time about the creative uses of leftovers. I’m not a food expert, nor do I pretend to be. I would be really weirded out if a PR person mailed me a kitchen appliance. Sure, there are people following the blog on Facebook and it’s an appropriate audience for kitchen products, but it’s just not right to flack anything with me. There are millions of other enthusiast bloggers who’d probably agree. Sending cameras to a camera enthusiast blogger so he or she will give you a good review just isn’t cool.
So do I think PR people should stay away from all bloggers? NO. Do I think that we should only deal with “expert” or professional bloggers that are similar to journalists? YES.
I am curious to hear the other side of the story in more than 140 characters, please!
