Buck Lawrimore

America is in dire straits right now. The economy is in chaos. Gasoline is in short supply. Unemployment is on the rise. How could our advanced country be in such a mess?

The answer I believe is that the country and its economy have become too complex for unskilled Congressmen - or presidents for that matter - to effectively manage this giant system. American government is far more complex than any corporation. Yet look at the skilled, experienced managers running GE, IBM and other top corporations.

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We’ve moved our blog from one web host to another because of a malicious hacking that occurred on Labor Day. Every page on every website we had on that hosting company was hacked with an advertisement for Viagra, placed at the bottom of the page and technically not visible. However it caused each page to load slowly and we assume the intent was to steal our visitors. It is taking us many hours to purge the bad Viagra code from our pages, and we’re still not done.

We host other websites with this company, one of the web’s largest hosts, and none of them have been hacked. So we have to assume that the point of entry was our Wordpress blog, or perhaps the Studio Press theme we were using. Research online indicates that themes can be one of the biggest “hacker holes” on websites because they are not all vetted for tight security. By contrast the themes offered on wordpress.org, including this one, are supposedly checked out to be OK.

So the moral of the story is, if you have a  Wordpress blog or are thinking about it, don’t host it on a control panel or account shared with other websites, and be very careful about the themes you choose - stick with those on the Wordpress site to be safe.

Twitter is hot. No doubt about it. When CNN anchors give their Twitter address so you can follow them online, it has reached the high-level mainstream. Here are 10 top reasons why Twitter is hot:

1. It’s free. Anyone can enjoy it at no cost.
2. It’s easy. Anyone can sign up for their own account at twitter.com and be posting tweets in minutes.
3. It’s fun. You can follow other people - friends and strangers, nadas and gurus, to see what they’re saying and if you don’t like what someone is posting, with a click, you don’t follow them any more.
4. It’s new. Early adopters and social media lovers get a kick out of twitter because it’s new. Lots of people don’t even know what Twitter is all about and think it sounds silly.
5. It sounds silly. Yep somehow this puts it in the same category as Google and Yahoo. Names which start out sound silly seem to capture the public imagination and catch on faster. In time they become respected and admired if they’re good at what they do.
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Marketing evolved mostly in the second half of the 20th Century as an outgrowth of the efforts of large corporations to increase their sales in an organized manner. Although the Internet has had a profound effect on the practice of marketing, it is still as much art as it is science in actual practice. There is no always reliable method for any given business or organization to increase sales, in part because there are so many variables in the dynamic marketplace that cannot be controlled, such as competition, the economy, mass media and other complex systems.

In recent years a new paradigm for understanding complex systems and their dynamics has emerged known as Complexity science, or just complexity for short. I created a simple introduction to “Complexity Made Simple” at http://www.lciweb.com/Complexity.

In this framework, an organization is a complex adaptive system (CAS) seeking to survive and thrive like a living organism in an ecosystem (marketplace). Its ability to survive and thrive depends largely on its abilities to adapt to the constantly changing environment. Thus the role of marketing is to enable the organization to monitor, understand and adapt to the changing environment most effectively. That rarely happens.

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I have long been fascinated with the power of intention. It was made popular by “The Secret” a couple of years ago but I have also read Wayne Dwyer’s “The Power of Intention” and also the book called “The Intention Experiment.”

I was reminded of this today when I went to the grocery store for a quick pick-up in the pouring rain. As I pulled into the parking lot, I thought, “I really want a parking place next to the building.” I started to ask God to find me a parking place, then instantly thought that was inappropriate, so I asked the Universe instead. (That’s what a lot of people who practice Intention do.) And lo and behold, within seconds an SUV began backing out of a parking space right next to the building - the only thing closer was a handicapped space.

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Branding is the topic of a great column by Guy Kawasaki in the September issue of Entrepreneur magazine (pg. 40). Guy says that there are 8 rules to follow for effective branding:

1. Seize the high ground - Base your brand on positive claims such as “making the world a better place” and not negative ones, certainly not in opposition to your competition.
2. Create one message - You can’t have more than one brand message for your company, even it it’s a big one. Keep it short and simple. One message for all.
3. Speak English - Avoid jargon. Use language that your grandmother can understand.
4. Apply the “opposite test” - If your brand claim is something like, “Our software is scalable, fast and easy to use” then that’s the same thing a competitor could say. If there is no “opposite” claim, don’t bother with pablum.
5. Cascade the message - Relay it up and down the organization so everyone knows it, believes it and repeats it.
6. Focus on PR, not advertising - Advertising lacks the credibility of articles in the news media, plus it is very expensive. Use PR for maximum advantage (something we believe in and practice at Charlotte marketing firm Lawrimore Inc.) to build your brand with many audiences believably.
7. Strive for humanness - Speak to your customers as individuals, not part of a market. Be personal and in time you may be rewarded with “my iPod” or “my Harley.”
8. Flow with the go - Ultimately it’s your customers and their perceptions that determines what your brand really means in the marketplace. Don’t go against that flow - capitalize on it and strengthen your brand with the real-world perceptions of customers.

Read more Guy Kawasaki great ideas at his website, Alltop.com.

Our news-aggregating website, CharlotteAreaNews.com, has a new feature, “Charlotte On Twitter.” It’s a continuously updated feed of posts on Twitter.com that include “Charlotte” or “Charlotte NC” in the message (”tweet”).

Check it out at http://www.CharlotteAreaNews.com/twitter.php

In case you are not familiar with Twitter, you won’t learn much by going to Twitter.com. It’s a rather plain screen that encourages you to sign up for your own account, free of course. However, a great way to monitor the messages on Twitter.com is to go to Monitter.com and change one or more of the keywords to anything that interests you - fashion, beer, sports etc. You can enter up to 3 keywords and watch messages with those keywords pop up regularly, unless of course you enter something obscure like Parcheesi or pistachio.

The “Charlotte On Twitter” page on CharlotteAreaNews.com uses a web script provided by Monitter.com, so it’s very similar - only it’s preloaded with “Charlotte” and “Charlotte NC.” It turns out that lots of people are named Charlotte, so they get mentioned in the first column, whereas “Charlotte NC” is much more restrictive. However not everyone writing about Charlotte the city adds “NC” so it’s a trade-off. Enjoy this new service and leave us a comment!