Last Man Standing…

..or Woman It has been an auspicious month for Kilted Chaos – Alex and I met for the first time – our articles of incorporation finally arrived, signed by Wyoming’s secretary of state – we’re delivering on 3 major corporate projects across three different countries and we have a kick ass creative genius that we’re nurturing. An overnight success that took 3 years!

Over the next month we will be re-branding Kilted Chaos, we won’t be losing the chaos sphere or our rather irreverent approach to business, but we will be making it easier for companies to understand what it is we do. We’ll be taking the lessons that we have learned while working with clients big and small over the years and applying them to ourselves. It’s the words – “lessons we have learned over the years” - that form the basis of this post. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a small business or an independent band – it is the lessons you learn by actually doing it that eventually shape what you become.

Alex and I first met online 3 years ago, I can’t remember the community – could have been Craig’s list, could have been a Wordpress message board, but he delivered a solution to a problem I had and did it in a way that made me want to engage back. Over the years we have built a relationship based on the equitable delivery of work product – we have learned how to communicate using email and Skype, we know how to disagree with each other, how to motivate each other, we’ve educated each other in new areas and as a result, we have a company that solves problems for many different types of organizations.

Over the years we have watched people and companies come and go – we’ve seen “Gurus” rocket to stardom for a couple of months and then just as quickly disappear – we’ve watched the aggressive self-promoters last a little longer but ultimately suffer the same fate – and yet all the while – we’ve been getting better and better at what we do.

The thing is – at some point – you have to actually deliver – or as Seth Godin says – you have to ship. Your sites have to work – your product has to actually rock!

We love this paradigm – both in business and in music – sure, right now – there’s a million different things competing for attention – but eventually – the wannabees, the poseurs, the douches, the people who are in it for the fast buck – they’re going to die out because they can’t sustain. We’ll be left with the people who kept at it – who did it – who didn’t give up, who learned from their mistakes and got better, who actually know how to make shit work and to make shit rock.

Your Music = Unique / Your Website = Derivative

Ask any band what they sound like and you can guarantee that they’ll tell you they’re unique. Sure they might give you qualifying reference points: Led Zeppelin meets the Eagles – Karen Carpenter on top of Diane Birch (Hmmmm!) but at the end of the day – when you listen to the band – there is no other soul on the planet that sounds like them.

So why would you want your band website to look like someone elses? I mean – you don’t dress like other bands do you?

There are loads of options for bands that are looking for a new site – companies are popping up every week with a new variation on the band theme template. However, when you look at the marketing that surrounds these solutions the one message that comes across very clearly is this:

“Spend your time writing and playing music and only spend a few minutes setting up your website – it’s Easy!”

Stop and think about that for a moment. Your website is your home – it is the place that the VAST majority of your fans will interact with you. Your website is international, no matter how many Volcanoes are hitting Europe. Do you really want the thing that differentiates you from the next band to be a different color background?

Here’s our view – your website is critical to your success and if you aren’t spending time learning how to use it and develop it then you may as well play your gigs onstage behind a black curtain. For every second that you spend on working out your stage plot, the set list – what the drummer’s going to wear…you need to double that on how you present on your website. We’re not saying that an awesome looking site is going to make up for lousy music – but a cool engaging site that screams who you are and makes it easy for a fan to interact with you and your music sure is going to help.

Now if you have the money – then you can skip that stage and hire us to come in and build a Kick Ass site for you – but we reckon that most bands starting out don’t have $550 lying around to blow on a website. But we reckon you do have time - learning tech is no different than learning an instrument – it all comes down to how many hours you put into it.

Kilted Chaos is working with DTF Works to build an affordable solution to this and yes – it involves you learning how to make shit work - more very soon.

Image Credit: Day 157 - Pasukaru76 on Flickr

Small Business Online Marketing Plan (Restaurant)

Having run a small business we know how essential it is to develop a useable marketing plan. It doesn’t matter how fancy and detailed the document is – if it isn’t easy to execute – you get lost in daily operations and your business doesn’t grow. Having an online marketing plan is as easy as talking to customers about your product and services (you are good at this yes?) but instead of talking, you are writing.

When you get a small business website from Kilted Chaos we use a tool that makes it easy for you to add content – what we would call a “post” - to your website. It really is no different than using a word processor; there’s a small learning curve as you deal with things like tags and images – but basically – adding content to your website will be as easy as creating a new flyer, adding an item to your menu or writing text for an advertisement.

We’ve been on a restaurant kick for the last couple of weeks so let’s see how adding new content can drive a restaurant’s digital and physical marketing:

1/ Every week write a new post about a different menu item
2/ During that week, reduce the price of the menu item by 50%
3/ Have on-table flyers promoting the item with a photo, price reduction and your website details
4/ Encourage diners to comment on the website – every week 1 commenter will win a free entrée
5/ On payment hand every diner a business card with the web address on the front and comment competition details on the back.

This is amazingly simple to do and to manage. The only time consuming thing is to produce the on-table flyers – but it’s definitely worth it in order to drive awareness of the menu, create customer generated content on your website and bring diners back. If you have 100 menu items – there’s 2 years of online marketing – already planned out!

A couple of points to remember: When you write the post – don’t just describe the dish – get someone you know who absolutely loves it to talk about why it is so good – make the description so tantalizing that people have to try it. Also, take your time to produce a good photograph of the dish – you’ll get better at this over time – but a simple camera phone with a good background can suffice – make it look appetizing – if it looks crap – don’t post it.

Quick and dirty sure but amazingly effective and you’ll be astonished by how much you learn about your menu. This approach can be used by any type of business and modified depending on what products and services they offer. Want to get started? Contact Kilted Chaos now and we’ll show you how.