Received junk direct mail from Verizon Wireless today.

Normally I tear this stuff up and throw it away. I don’t need a new phone or additional services.

However, the envelope teaser made me pause:

“You’ve been exceeding your plan minutes. We can help. Please open immediately.”

So I opened the envelope. Inside was a simple letter explaining that because I’ve been exceeding my plan minutes, I should call to see if I need a plan upgrade.

Of course there’s a plug for the Friends and Family(r) plan, but that’s ok because the letter really was all about me.

Great teaser. Great letter. It’s simple, to the point, and it worked for me.

What was the last piece of direct mail that got you to take action and why?

At many of the presentations I’ve given recently about social media, the one I question I hear repeatedly is, “How do you find the time?“

The time question is especially relevant for people who work for companies — you do have a job to do.

And, you don’t want to waste spend a lot of company time on something that’s not a proven marketing tactic or that hasn’t been approved of by management.

The question is also relevant for consultants and freelancers, as Alan Weiss points out in his excellent post, “What Price Glory? Or: Can We Get Some Air in Here?“

In his post, Alan lists a number of results-oriented marketing activities you can do in place of social media. (It’s a great list so be sure to read his post.)

I think, however, that people are asking the wrong question.

Instead of asking, “How do I find the time?” you should ask, “What do I want to get from social media?” and then devise a strategy based on your objective/s.

Once you have your strategy nailed down, you can then implement it based on your available time (and staff) resources. Having a strategy will also keep you focused.

If you’re a corporate marketer, for example, and your company has yet to make a foray into social media, your objective may be to simply follow a few bloggers in your industry as well as keep abreast of what people are saying about your company or industry in general.

Your strategy then, is easy to implement and incorporate into your work flow:

Find a few bloggers to follow — Do a search on Google or Technorati using industry keywords to find relevant bloggers: i.e. Healthcare IT consultants, MEMS manufacturing blogs, etc.

Some blogs, such as TechCrunch, have become “must read” blogs for people in specific industries. Other blogs may not be as influential but you’ll find lots of excellent information plus links to other influential bloggers.

To easily follow blogs, set up a Google Reader or Bloglines account.

These applications make it easy to follow blogs as you’ll receive the RSS feeds in one place versus having to check in constantly for updated posts.

Join LinkedIn Groups — You can find hundreds of Groups on LinkedIn for all types of industries and topics. A search for “Healthcare IT” yields 1,607 Groups. A search for “MEMS” yields 33 very targeted Groups.

Once you find a two or three Groups that appeal to you and that include your customers or potential customers, join them and then follow the discussions.

You’ll learn your customers’ challenges, you’ll see who are some of the players, and you’ll find new blogs to follow as many people now incorporate their blogs into their LinkedIn profiles.

Some groups are more active than others and not all Groups have ongoing discussions, so join only the active ones.

Look for forums where your customers hang out — Every industry has a forum where people of a like mind congregate. You can join these forums without having to participate. As with LinkedIn, once you join, you can follow discussions and get to know what your customers and potential customers are talking about — including what they’re saying about your company.

Use Twitter Search — Set up an RSS feed on Twitter Search for your company name and/or products. Whenever someone uses these terms, you’ll be alerted via your Google Reader or Bloglines account.

Set up Google Alerts for your company and product names — Google Alerts works this way: any time a specific search phrase is used in a blog post, Web content, online news article, video or podcast, you’ll receive an Alert from Google via email with a link to the content.

This saves you the time of having to do a manual search. You can set up an Alert in about two seconds and can have as many Alerts as you want.

That’s it — you are now ready to follow what’s being said about your company quite easily — without having to spend hours doing so.

In addition, once you begin getting a feel for social media and how it works, you can then revise your objective and strategy and begin participating by leaving comments on blogs, opening a Twitter account, and participating in LinkedIn discussions.

Tomorrow I’ll cover how consultants and freelancers can use social media more effectively.

In a recent teleclass, Alan Weiss, author of the book, Million Dollar Consulting, and the Contrarian Consulting blog, gave ten tips on how to weather this recession.

One of those tips was to keep a positive mental attitude by looking for the positive in all of the negative news.

For example, although the media makes it seem like US business is going to hell – bankruptcies, layoffs, financial meltdown, and GE’s stock price down to 2! – Alan said to himself (I’m paraphrasing), “There’s no way GE is going bankrupt. Their financial business is having problems but the company makes refrigerators, washing machines, etc. They’re stable.”

So he bought GE stock and at the time of the teleclass, it was up 10 points.

GlobalLogic, Inc., an outsourced product development firm based in Vienna, Virginia, is another company that is growing in this tough economy by taking advantage of the fact that companies need to develop software – fast – but also need to reduce development costs.

What follows is an interview with John Hitchcock, the company’s VP of Global Marketing, on why the company is doing so well.

Dianna Huff: John, explain what your company does and how it got started.

John Hitchcock: GlobalLogic works with companies that develop products that they sell to other companies.
The company is in a market segment that didn’t exist nine years ago because clients believed that our service offering — software development — wasn’t something that they would consider outsourcing.

To outsource software development or take on a partnership simply wasn’t conceivable. Thanks to changes in our economy, that concept has completely changed.

GlobalLogic is now a 3,000-person company with $100 million in revenue. (We’re venture backed by VCs Sequoia, NEA, and New Atlantic.) When I joined the company two years ago, we were a $27 million dollar company — so you can see the tremendous growth. We’ve been profitable 25 straight quarters.

We work with three types of companies:

• Independent software vendors (i.e Oracle, Microsoft plus small early stage companies)
• Technology product companies such as MedTronics
• Software enabled businesses (which is our own internal term) that do business in the digital world and have Internet-based products or whose businesses rely solely on the Internet.

The Hearst Corporation and Zappos, both of whom are our clients, are two examples.

DH: Ok, got it. But why are these companies now using your services?

JH: In a nutshell: everything changes, including how companies do business.

In the past, companies never outsourced the design, development or support of software products. US and European companies are hungry for talented engineers — and for the last few years they couldn’t hire them fast enough. Before the recession, the cost of hiring engineers wasn’t an issue — finding them was problem. It could take a company 6 – 9 months to find and hire the right team of engineers.

Now, of course, cost is a real issue.

The second issue is time to market; the third issue is quality. Previously it was very hard to convince companies that they could achieve the same quality using outsourced talent.

The quality issue was critical — these are software-based products clients are selling to their clients. We had to convince clients that they would not see a drop-off in quality.

Early on, our marketing was missionary-based because the company had to convince people that outsourcing software development was doable. We had to prove that using an outsourced team would work as well as prove the cost savings, the quality, and the faster time to market.

DH: What can marketers learn from you?

JH: Pay attention to the micro and macro challenges.

A year ago, the major technology analysts were not on our radar screen because our clients were small and mid-size business (SMBs). These companies don’t have relationships with analysts.

Due to the economy, this has all changed. SMBs are hurting and cutting back on spending. Big companies, however, are spending — and they work with analysts. As these companies broaden their client portfolios, they look to analysts for advice on vendors.

Hence, a significant portion of our marketing budget now goes to working with analysts. We attend their conferences and make sure they have enough information in order to get covered in their reports.

This is a huge shift for us.

At the micro level, we’ve also changed our selling position. For example, two years ago, we didn’t highlight the cost savings of using our services – the savings was implied but not marketed.

Now we focus on how companies can reduce operating expenses by 25% plus raise revenue because they can get product out faster with more features.

DH: Are you currently hiring?

JH: Yes, we are! Right now in the conference room next to me are 10 new hires (all US employees).

DH: Thanks, John, for this terrific interview. And, thank you to Vojtech Horna, of Atomic PR in San Francisco, for setting up this interview.

If you follow me on Twitter, you know I’ve been bemoaning my existence these last few weeks.

My desktop machine somehow got infected with a rootkit, a very malicious piece of malware. I had to call in Geek Housecalls to remove it.

Despite being free of the rootkit, I was still finding various trojans every single day (stuff like keystroke loggers).

My geeky son had turned me on to Malwarebytes, an anti-malware tool, before all of this started, and once I realized I needed some advanced help, I emailed the company.

Within a few hours, a tech support person had opened a support ticket for me. I was impressed.

That was on Monday, May 11. Since then, Tom, my techie, has been working with me to run scans using various tools to ensure my system is clean. We are down to the last scan and so far — keeping my fingers crossed! — everything looks very good.

Malwarebytes offers a free and for-fee version of their software. (For the record, I purchased the software.)

According to Geek Housecalls, Malwarebytes is on the cutting edge of combating rootkits and trojans (not even CA, the anti-virus program I use, was finding the stuff Malwarebytes found).

They also have a great forum where you can find all kinds of information and support.

So, this is a huge thank you to Tom at Malwarebytes and to the company itself. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Once your machine is infected, it’s as if you’ve been violated. Malwarebytes lowered my anxiety level considerably . . . making it so I felt confident to use my machine again.

In this day and age of companies that take days to respond to emails (if they do at all) or shunting you to voice mail hell, it’s refreshing to get help from a responsive person who is nice, to boot.

Do you have an experience with an infected machine? Do you have a positive customer service story you’d like to share? Please do so!

I love seeing cool and original marketing campaigns — and one arrived at my doorstep yesterday in the form of chocolate covered grasshoppers.

Yep. They arrived in a white plastic ziplock pouch with copy that read:

You’re a risk-taker, a dream-realizer. What’s left to do that you haven’t already done? Eat a grasshopper. They’re farm raised, covered in chocolate and rich in protein. So, not only will you be breaking boundaries, but you’ll be eating healthy, too.

A tag attached to the pouch gives a clue as to why I received this culinary delight: “Entrepreneurs can change the world. Join the movement now! grasshopper.com/idea”

My son got pretty excited and went to check out the site but couldn’t figure out what the company was offering . . . after viewing the site, I think the company is offering a service where you sign on for a national telephone number that then sends your voice mail messages to your email, Blackberry, etc.

I think the service is a great idea, and I love the campaign, but I’m not sure why I was targeted. Apparently, 5,000 of us received the grasshoppers (the tag says I have grasshopper bag #1343 of 5,000).

Go check out the site and see what you think. And, let me know if you would eat chocolate-covered grasshoppers.

Update:

Did some research on this chocolate covered grasshopper campaign.

According to a Fox News video, a company in Needham, MA sent the grasshoppers to 5,000 “of the most influential people in the U.S.” in the hopes that these people would then talk about the company and its campaign (ahem).

Having spent the last few days looking at the pouch of grasshoppers sitting on my desk, I am still of two minds concerning this campaign.

On the one hand, I agree with Internet Marketing Consultant Brent Csutoras who says this is a very clever social media campaign.

On the other hand, I also agree with Dave Ibsen, author of 5 Blogs Before Lunch, who says that he’s not sure why he needs an “Advanced Number” or even what an “Advanced Number” is.

As I posted above, that is exactly what I thought when I viewed the company’s Website.

So, the company got me and lots of other people to write about its campaign — which according to the Fox News video, was the company’s objective.

But, it didn’t get me to buy — or even consider its service. Is the campaign a failure or success?

I’ve given about six or seven presentations since November . . . what used to be a scary, nerve-wracking experience has now become quite a bit of fun.

Although I enjoy public speaking, I know I can do better. So I was very happy to read David Meerman Scott’s blog post, 10 Tips for Becoming an Incredibly Successful Public Speaker, a while ago.

I used a few of his tips, especially the one about not using PowerPoint as a teleprompter. (Guilty as charged.)

David followed up his initial 10 tips post with another post about his colleague, Nick Morgan, offering a free e-book, before you Open Your Mouth — the keys to great public speaking. It’s a free download — meaning no registration required.

Nick discusses the four keys that make a speaker a *great* speaker, and one of those key elements is rehearsing your speech.

This is something I learned early on. I usually spend a good three to five hours rehearsing. I rehearse getting up to the podium or stage, my introduction, any stories I’m using, and my transitions.

Most importantly, I rehearse how to click through to things like YouTube videos and Websites — because technological snafus are the worst, something I learned at the last presentation I gave.

I share my mistakes with you, and what I learned, so that you can learn from me (as I learned from David).

BIG MISTAKE #1: Instead of using my own laptop, I used the laptop provided. The laptop had Vista, which I haven’t used, thus, I fumbled around a lot with the unfamiliar environment.

BIG MISTAKE #2: Because I didn’t have my own computer, I didn’t check to see if I could access Websites such as YouTube before my presentation.

Thus, I couldn’t show my great social media examples. And, I couldn’t get into SM sites such as Twitter because I couldn’t remember my passwords.

BIG MISTAKE #3: I kept pointing at the laptop versus using a laser pointer to point things out on the screen. An audience member pointed it out to me — a tip for which I am eternally grateful!

The audience was very nice and we all laughed about the snafus, but I learned a huge lesson.

That night I gave another presentation and made sure everything was working before the audience arrived. I also opened all of the sites I would be accessing during the presentation so that they were ready to go before-hand.

What the lessons have you learned while giving presentations?

I recently moved my office from out of my home and into a professional building. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a long time.

I first started my business (in 1998) when my son was 12 months old. At the time, working part-time out of my home was ideal as it allowed me to spend more time with my son.

As my workload increased, however, it became harder to separate work from my personal life. Then, with the advent of social media and email overload, I experienced too many days when I felt like I was working around the clock and/or chained to my computer.

Moving my business out of my house has given me that “separation” that I’ve craved for a long time. (And quite frankly, not listening to my dogs bark during client calls is a definite plus!)

I thought moving my office would be a simple matter. My husband had my desk, a couple of file cabinets, and a bookcase out of my old office in a couple of hours.

It was the packing up that really opened my eyes to how lost I had become in my office — something that can happen to anyone who has been working in the same space for years.

Your sub-conscious affects your conscious

Once my furniture was gone, I was shocked at how dirty my office really was — even though I cleaned it regularly.

It was in that instant of standing in an empty room that I understood why you must keep your workspace immaculate.

Cobwebs on the ceiling, piles of paper, and lots of unnecessary “stuff” equals cobwebs on the brain — and unclear thinking.

Because I had to empty all my drawers so that my husband could lift the furniture, I took the time to clean out my files. What started off as an “easy” task ballooned into days of going through piles of paper.

I realized that although my files *looked* organized, they were anything but. I ended up recycling five bins of paper.

Even better, I culled four drawers of files down to one — and ended up throwing away YEARS of hard copy writing samples (all of which were covered in dust due to sitting on shelves, which tells you something).

I also realized I no longer needed many of my books and called Got Books, who carted away seven cartons of them. (Whew!)

At the end of the day, it took me a week to clean out my office, files, and assorted items. It was a lot of work but well worth the time and effort.

My new office is immaculate and pared down. For the first time, I’m able to use my entire desk because it’s not covered in piles of magazines, printed reports, and other junk.

And, I now have a good view of where I’m going . . . because my view is no longer obstructed by years of detritus.

Have you moved your office and/or done a total clean out? If so, what lessons did you learn?

I haven’t fallen off the face of the earth, although judging by my lack of blog posts, it appears that I might have.

My lack of posting is due to a number of factors: I went on vacation, I moved my office, and I’ve been working hard on getting my new site up and running: The Profitable Consultant.

I’m pretty excited about this site — which is geared toward consultants and freelancers in any industry who want to learn how to better market their businesses.

As I explain on the About Us page, I’ve worked with small to large B2B companies for years now, but have always had consultants and freelancers call me to ask for advice about how to start a business, how to optimize their sites, or how to better market themselves.

My mission has always been to help businesses achieve real results through marketing, so combining marketing, coaching, and my love for helping people made sense — hence, The Profitable Consultant.

Check it out and let me know what you think! I’m still fixing minor bugs, so if you find anything, give me a shout.

Also be sure to download my latest product: Goof-Proof Email: How to Avoid the Seven Most Common Email Pitfalls.

Photo credit goes to Carlton SooHoo, a *fabulous* photographer. Site design by Sonora DesignWorks in Amesbury, MA. (Thanks a bunch, Del!)