The Glass House Premieres in Dallas this Sunday at 2:15 at the Angelika

 

The Glass House finally comes to Dallas. Join me this Sunday at the Angelika Theater in Dallas (Mockingbird Station) at 2:15 for the premier of this moving documentary that breaks cultural and racial barriers.

With a virtually invisible camera, The Glass House takes us on a never-before-seen tour of the underclass of Iran. This groundbreaking documentary reflects a side of Iran few have access to. It introduces us to a group of courageous women working to instill a sense of empowerment and hope into the lives of otherwise discarded teenage girls.

Melissa Hibbard (my niece) and her hubby Hamid Rahmanian, are the film makers of the award winning documentary film The Glass House. Melissa wrote and produced and Hamid directed the movie. For more info and to see a clip of the film, go to http://www.fictionvillestudio.com/. THE GLASS HOUSE recently won the OSCE HUman Right Award at Docufest, 2009.

Watch the trailer here.

Purchase tickets here (tickets will also be available at the theater Sunday)

Please join me this Sunday for The Glass House at the Angelika Theater at Mockingbird Station in Dallas. The film is showing at 2:15 pm.

Love and peace!

Sandy

The Glass House Team

Susaan is 20 yeas old. She uses temporary marriages to protect herself from the violence and sexual abuse from her brothers. She’s getting an education, learning to defend herself and confronting her past at the center, but does she have what it takes to push herself over that jagged edge and make a good life for herself? While attending the center she has gone from one abusive relationship to another, in search of something or someone to hang on to.

Nazilla is 19 years old. She is being groomed to eventually return to the center and work as social worker. When her mother abandoned the family five years ago, Nazilla was left with the burden of taking care of 6 younger siblings and her father. Most of those years she bottled up her own emotions and submitted to her elders and obligations. Today she dreams of being a famous rap singer but dreams are hard to realize when the responsibilities of other people’s lives weight down hard on you.

Nooshin, 17 years old, strives along side her bigger sister, Nazila, to make something of her future. With the Center’s guidance, she learns a trade and discovers that there’s more to success than a tough, man-hating façade.

Mitra was abandoned by her mother at age 9. Not only has she had to deal with her own loss but also physically suffered the anger and hurt of her father. At the center for more than 6 months, Mitra is learning to fill the empty space her mother left behind with love for herself and her newly discovered talent for creative writing. Still she goes home to her father every night where she is chided for being over weight and lazy. This constant discouragement makes her struggle all the more difficult and physically dangerous.

Samira is only 14 years old. After her parents divorced, she lived alone with her mother who gave a lethal combination of alcohol, crystal meth and ecstasy pills to the young girl to keep her out of her mother’s hair. The social workers at the center work close with state agencies and doctors to try to help her recover but the task is overwhelming. As an addict for more than 4 years, Samira must first overcome a dependency on crystal meth before she can begin the rehabilitation of her soul and spirit.

Nargess, Sussan’s younger sister, is only 10 years old. While Sussan does her best to take care of her little sister, it’s hardly enough to protect her from the dangers of her own home. The center steps in to take Nargess from her abusive environment but the family and state stand in their way.

3 Ways to Leverage the Internet in Your Personal Marketing

Today there are more options for marketing your business than ever before.  This age of connectivity has also brought with it the age of confusion for some who are overwhelmed with all the choices.  But don’t let it get the best of you.  If you will choose three things to CHANGE in your marketing, or three things to START in your marketing, you can come out a winner.

Now, there are more than three ways to leverage the Internet in your personal marketing, but for simplicity sake, I am going to cover the three things that I feel are important enough to put at the top of your marketing list.  Are you ready?  And remember, that any marketing initiative must follow a well thought out plan and assessment of your time, imagination and budget…

• Be realistic about your time constraints and the amount of time you can commit to for carrying out the marketing plan
• Your marketing carries YOUR message, you are only limited by your imagination and the ideas and information you are able to produce
• Money is a key factor, how much can you spend?  How often do you need to spend it? How much are you willing to invest in your future NOW is the first step in planning your marketing

You know I always say “the Internet is a brew-pot of potential” and those willing to work it will no doubt see an increase in business activity, exposure, and loyalty.  By developing relationships and providing informational content to your growing sphere of influence, you are able to reach into the lives of your potential clients and make a difference!  There are three ways I see this happening, and they all fit together like the internal workings of a heirloom timepiece:

• A custom eNewsletter
• A personal Blog
• A Facebook account

A custom eNewsletter provides regular updates and information about you, your business and your industry to a targeted list.

A personal blog pushes out the articles from your eNewsletter to a wider audience, creating an online presence and setting you up as an “information guru”.

A carefully worked Facebook page engages the people you know and creates “fans” of your business by providing them with great content that will further engrave you and your business into their minds.

See how it all works together?  This is the beauty of connectivity on the Internet!  If your goal is to grow your business, increase your leads, and convert them into paying clients, leveraging the Internet will help you get there.  It does take a time commitment, and there will be a learning curve for many, but the benefits will outweigh the cost and you will be setting yourself and your business up for future success.

Love and peace!

Sandy

From print ads to Twitter tweets and Facebook faceoffs – Diversity in Marketing is Queen!

Marketing “Lifestyles”

In this day and time, in our businesses we are all looking for “the one thing”.  That one tool or product that will get our marketing done, bring us prospects, make the sale, clean our house, make us happy….I could go on.  The problem with that concept is that in a diverse business market, there is MORE than just ONE way.  There are MANY.  Many ways to get leads, to market your product, to brand your business, to be happy, to be entertained…get the idea?

I want to talk to you about diversity in your marketing.  Just like there are many types of customers out there, there are also many ways to reach them.  The failure to reach your customer might be in the method you are using.  Look at your market segment.  Are they boomers?  Are they just out of college?  Where do they live?  Country?  City?  Uptown?  Suburbs?  Believe it or not, where your prospect lives tells a big story about their lifestyle and their preferences when it comes to how they make their purchases and how they communicate.

In executing a marketing plan, it is important to be as diverse as the market you serve.  Do not put all your eggs in one basket!  Spread your marketing message out over a number of marketing venues:  social networking, email, print, sponsorships, and good old-fashioned call phones to set up a lunch or one-on-one.  There is business waiting for you in all types of marketing.  Depending upon your target market, you may want to focus on social networking to build relationships, or you may want to use the US Mail to deliver nice business letters offering your services.  You have to know your customer.

Understanding your market segment is vital to delivering an effective marketing message that they will see and respond to.  Choose the marketing vehicle where your prospective customer is going – where they hang out.  If you are selling real estate, over 86% of homebuyers are searching online to buy homes. Can your message be found there?

If you haven’t already, it is time to review and audit your marketing plan for this year and see what has worked for you.  Use your findings as a basis to begin planning for 2010 to deliver your marketing message to the people you want to reach (your niche) – and there are many ways to do that:

Basic Marketing Examples:

Pop-by (unannounced visit)

Direct Mail/Postcards/Letters

Email Blast/Email Drip

Phone call

One-on-One (appointment)

Print Ad in School Program

Press Release/Announcement

Feature Story

Billboard/Sign

Flyer/Door Hanger

Website/Blog

Facebook/Twitter

Online Social Networking

Sponsorship

Networking Group

Community Volunteer

eNewsletter

Print Newsletter

Out of the box (Kuzies or a wild idea!)

As you can see from the list, there are many ways to reach your customer.  Try incorporating at least three items that match your target audience lifestyle to build into your marketing plan then put it into action now.  Knowing your customer is one of the most valuable tools you can have – in a diverse business market, diversity in marketing is Queen!

Going GREEN in your Marketing using Social Networking: Twitter Facebook Plaxo and LinkedIn

Go GREEN in your Marketing

Going GREEN in your Marketing is more than not wasting paper! It’s about using the resources that are available that saves you time and money. It’s using online systems.

The first thing I think about when I think “GREEN” (other than the lush landscape you would expect to see in Switzerland or New Zealand) is saving energy, lowering my consumption of energy and being kind to our planet. Expanding that thought is to think GREEN in our businesses – and what better green to conserve than our dollars and our time that is worth money!

Today we are witnessing the restructuring of traditional marketing and advertising methods in business.  There are some companies that are holding on tight to old methods, but I am afraid these methods are ending.  The consumer is online, for everything.  Taking our marketing online to be found by our target audience should be the #1 priority in our business and marketing plans.

So, how do we go GREEN in our marketing?

• First, look at WHO your customer is and how you can reach them – take your message to them, invite them to join you online
• Stop wasting dollars on generic broadcast advertising, instead laser-focus your message to people who know you and have done business with you – the WHO is more important than the WHAT (thanks Alibrown.com for those words of wisdom!)
• Establish an online identity for your business and services, engage in social networking, don’t be AFRAID!
• Think “viral” – your marketing message has the potential to reach many more thousands of viewers online than traditional print advertising.  Viral is simply a buzz-word meaning your message is spread across multiple websites, forwarded via email, sharing and RSS feeds [using Twitter, Facebook, Plaxo, LinkedIn, and others] – with the right tools “going Viral” will save time and cost little to nothing!
• Take a look at all those marketing programs you are paying for.  Are they overlapping services?  Determine which ones you are using and cancel the rest (marketing waste!)
• Update your website to Web 2.0 – collaborate with your viewers and clients – Connect, Collaborate, Content!
• No more junk mail. Make your marketing message meaningful and STOP using generic “canned” marketing.  People see right through it and will only trash it!  Like I said last month, CONTENT is King and people online expect great content that speaks to them!

With GREEN Marketing, you will organize your tools and resources and turn them into a system that works while you are tending to business – conserving your time and marketing dollars.

NEW PICS: 10-Photo Challenge Using my iPhone

I was in the mood for some creativity this long holiday weekend so in follow up to my Labor Day 10-Photo Challenge using your iPhone or mobile device, here are my results.  Tonight’s the deadline, so here we go!  Let me know your thoughts…peace and love – Sandy

Labor Day Photographic Assignment – 10-Photo Challenge

Taken in garage with iPhone - love the color!

Let’s forget politics, marketing deadlines, business plans and money for a minute and put our creative eyes to work over this long Labor Day weekend!  Join me for another 10-photo challenge, originally inspired by Chase Jarvis, photographer extraordinaire!

Here’s how it works:  Using your iphone or other mobile phone camera, take 10 photos within 10 meters of you.  Look for the detail, the color, texture, whatever inspires you  in the common or not-so-common things that surround you – whether you are at home watching football, by the pool, or travelling to an exotic destination!  Take a zillion photos then choose the best 10.  Then post them to your favorite photo hosting page – photobucket, smugmug, twitpix -  or upload to your Facebook  account or blog.  Be sure to “share” the link to the photos  via Facebook,  Twitter, Digg, and any other social networking site you are a member of.  DEADLINE:  have the photos up Monday evening.

Let’s look for the beauty that is around us and share it!  Spread the love!

Have fun!

Sandy

Boldly Build Your Way to Business Success

I wanted to share another business building article, this one is compliments of Ali Brown, marketing guru and coach.   An unstinting faith in her own ability and destiny has helped Ali Brown become one of the most successful female entrepreneurs of her generation. As founder and CEO of Ali International, LLC, a company which was recently named to the 2009 *Inc 500*, an exclusive ranking of the nation’s fastest-growing private companies, she has created a dynamic multimillion dollar enterprise that is devoted to empowering women around the world. Through the power of entrepreneurship Ali helps close to 40,000 members start and grow their own businesses.

I started following Ali Brown back in 2005 and have had the privilege of watching her business grow over this time to one of the fastest growing private companies in the nation!  When Ali speaks I listen.  I have learned more from her ezines and telecalls than from any other marketing coach.  I highly recommend her and encourage you to sign up for her weekly “Spotlight” ezine, the link is at the bottom of the article.  Enjoy the article and feel free to leave your comments.

Boldly Build Your Way to Business Success by Ali Brown

As you’re growing your business, your own personal level of confidence and passion comes into play on a number of levels. When you’re confident in your business and you’re working on a project you love, your clients can tell. In fact, they feed from your positive energy and learn to trust you as a resource. That’s why choosing the right path and taking the right steps along the way can tremendously improve your business – and your bottom line.

Here’s how.

Match your business to your personality. Passion is a broad, often abstract concept, but personality is a bit easier to define. Both are important considerations as you’re deciding on a business model. You might be passionate about writing, but if your personality craves social interaction, then sitting alone at your computer for hours probably won’t bring you happiness. You might decide to join forces with other creative professionals and offer a full slate of marketing and creative services, or you could incorporate teaching and speaking into your business model. On the other hand, if you dread being in the spotlight, then an online business might be a perfect fit for your personality.

Build your skill set. Many career coaches will advise you to “follow your passion,” but you also need a strategy for monetizing it. If your beloved hobby isn’t profitable, then think about related interests or search for something else that ignites that feeling of passion. If you’re passionate about an area where you already have in-depth knowledge and a money-making idea, then you’re in great shape already! If not, then buckle down and start building your expertise. Regardless of what your business does, many business-owners benefit from taking classes in negotiation and public speaking. You never know when you might have the chance to appear on camera or on a panel, and you’ll want to be ready!

Offer solutions. Meeting the needs of your customers is a huge confidence booster! When you satisfy someone else and solve their problems, you feel better about yourself, too. Think about what products, services, or other ideas will make your customer’s lives easier and better. What problems do they face? What frustrates them or prevents them from achieving their full potential? How you can alleviate those issues? This is a great way to capitalize on your passion and make money in the process.

Do it better than the competition. Knowing you are the best at what you do serves the needs of your clients and gives you a competitive edge. You don’t need to be the most innovative or famous if you know that your company can deliver its products or services better than any of its competitors. Friendly, prompt customer service goes a long way in edging out the competition, because so few companies make it a priority.

Entrepreneurial confidence comes from many sources. Remember, you are “designing your business to create an extraordinary life,” so let no part of you suffer to succeed, and success will surely be yours!

Self-made multimillionaire entrepreneur and Inc. 500 CEO Ali Brown is devoted to creating financial freedom for women globally through the power of entrepreneurship. To learn how to create wealth and live an extraordinary life now, register for her free weekly articles at www.AliBrown.com.  © 2009 Ali International, LLC

The Building Blocks of Social Media for Business

SEPTEMBER 1, 2009  – Article by Chris Brogan, Community and Social Media

Where do you start? That’s the question I get often when I’m asked how to help a company market using social media tools. The people who contact me are smart. They tell me things like, “Yeah, they said we should start with a blog, and we said, ‘like the blog we already have?’” But what comes next is rarely a simple choice. I wanted to take you through some thoughts on what the basic building blocks of social media might be for a business (in the context of marketing, but then stretching a bit further out).

Remember, roadmaps don’t work really well until you have a solid goal or destination in mind. None of this matters unless it feels right to you, regardless of my advice. You know your company’s boundaries. You know what your comfort levels are. Proceed at your organizational pace.

Grow Bigger Ears

Most social media plans start with how you can talk. I prefer to start with listening. We learn more by listening (all salespeople know this, as do animals). We hear what people are saying. We can learn the cadence of a place. Want to start out in social media? Grow bigger ears.

Make a Friendly Base

In the past, we used the web strictly to collect information or transact one-way business like shopping. Many companies still have their online presence set up like this: as a place to inform.

With the tools of the social web, we can offer so much more: a two-way place where information can be started by one person, and then augmented or refuted or discussed by others. One manifestation of this is a blog. A blog is a great place for discussions. If you want to be really daring and clever with your base, you might even contemplate a site that permits user-driven information. I could see that being interesting: a site where your existing customers provide the lion’s share of the information and interaction around your product or service. (Would you dare to do that?)

Also, make sure your home base has sharing tools like Share This on your site, to help empower others to spread the word about your content.

Extend into Outposts

Depending on your type of customer, it’s important to get out to where they are. It’s great that you’ve built a site, but find our where your customers are spending their time, and get over there. Your efforts to grow bigger ears will help in that regard.

When you decide to build outposts, start small but decisively human. If you build a Twitter account, follow some people (maybe prospects, but maybe also just people you find interesting: you met them via the “grow bigger ears” part), and pay attention to the flow of conversations. Listen for a few days before trying out your own voice.

Don’t make your efforts on places like Twitter and Facebook solely about driving people to your home base, but instead, be helpful, participatory, and a good citizen of the social space you’re occupying. When you have some really interesting or helpful information, consider pointing people to your post for more information.

Community Participation

There are places where people might be talking about your products and services. These might be on 3rd party communities, or might be in “commons” spaces like Facebook. If you choose to engage by being a participant, be wary that your efforts might be perceived as intrustive, that your efforts to correct factual errors on such sites might be met with disdain, and that when you’re participating on other people’s turf, you don’t have much say in how things are portrayed.

You might also choose to build your own community platform around your products and services. This can be a very rewarding experience, but it can also be an effort in futility. Just because you’ve got a great product doesn’t mean a community will be an obvious hit. Other times, there are great products, a community who really cares about it, and then the platform doesn’t empower the types of interactions the users want.

If you build a community platform, realize that the goal of that community is to empower your members, and to equip them with added benefits from belonging. Don’t use it as a marketing ground, or a place from which to advertise your products. Use it as a way to inform, to share, to give something back.

The results will be much more effective.

Email Marketing

You live or die by your database. If you leave all your online marketing efforts strictly to social platforms and your blogs, you’re missing a very effective and powerful tool: email marketing. Some of you just flinched, and some of you are thinking that email marketing is so 1995. The tool is every bit as amazing as it’s ever been. What’s changed to make me feel this way are the methods in which it can be used.

A solid email marketing experience in the coming months involves mass customization, something that goes beyond the “Dear [firstname]” experience we use today. If I had my way, I’d design an interface to my email marketing platform that let me make all kinds of calculations on what to send, based on my recent interactions, based on comments left on the blog, and based on all kinds of other information that’s not as simple to plan for as, say, adding in static database fields.

For now, simply having a solid list that appreciates your contact is a powerful tool to have. I use Blue Sky Factory for my email marketing platform (disclosure: I’m friends with the company and they have sponsored several of my events. I am more than a little bit biased). The reason I use them is that they have great support and great relationships with the spam police of the universe, a good thing to have.

Mobile and Beyond

Like with all things promised to us on the Internet, the reality of augmented reality is about a decade later than it was promised. With the Apple iPhone 3Gs, it turns out that applications that mash up location data with web information are coming and coming fast. I don’t have any implementation experience on these types of tools yet, but know that I’m going to dive in fast and furious, as it’s definitely part of what’s next.

Location apps, augmented reality, and much more context-aware marketing are where I think things will heat up next. If you think social tools are interesting in 2D spaces like your browser, imagine what the real world offers for thrills and overlaid excitement.

Your Turn

Did I miss any of the basic building blocks of social media, from your perspective? What needs more clarification? How can I help explain this out a bit better for you?

By the way, that cool Lego display is at the See Science Center in Manchester, New Hampshire, and is astounding.

Smart Phone Apps Fuel Business

By DIANA RANSOM

Between documenting expenses and processing credit cards from just about anywhere in the U.S., smartphone applications have changed the way many small businesses operate. Now, more firms are turning to these apps to enhance the way customers interact with their products and services — and even boost their bottom lines.

“People nowadays want everything to be at their fingertips, and if companies are not finding ways to provide these tools [they] will soon see drop-off from their customers,” says Jennifer Shaheen, a small business technology consultant in White Plains, N.Y. Providing an app also offers a tremendous marketing opportunity, she says. Securing a placeholder in customers’ smartphones can help keep a company on the brain, which is especially important in this rocky economy, Shaheen says.

Building a simple app can be affordable for most companies. Although a developer might charge $6,000 to $8,000 to create a typical app, a modest app with fewer features could cost a company less than $2,000, says Jarin Udom, a developer in San Diego. The web site iPhoneAppQuotes.com allows users to compare lowest rate quotes from developers.

Companies on a tight budget can design apps on their own. Apple’s iPhone Developer Program ($99 for the standard edition, $299 for the enterprise version) allows code-savvy entrepreneurs to build, test and sell or give away their own applications. Sweb Apps helps business owners build apps automatically for as little as $200. (Note that although Research In Motion’s BlackBerry, Palm’s Pre and Google’s Android each have apps and open software development kits, many app services cater specifically to Apple’s iPhone users.)

Here are three ways an app can improve your business:

Attract new customers
Some companies are using smartphone apps to advertise or expose their service to a new and growing audience. David Wolff, co-founder of Break Down Way, a Pomeroy, Ohio-based online service that provides guitar and bass lessons, says he hopes his soon-to-be-released app will help reel in new customers. Wolff plans to offer about five to 10 free lessons on the app, which is now awaiting approval from Apple. For those who want to keep learning, a subscription for $29.99 a month gives users access to the company’s full catalogue of lessons taught by artists including Jorma Kaukonen from Jefferson Airplane and Michael Falzarano from Hot Tuna.

barbara Stein takes guitar instruction from BreakDownWay's new iPhone app.

“Existing members will jump on this, and we’ll attract people searching [Apple's App Store] for guitar lessons,” Wolff says. That group of people is growing. Apple sold 1.5 billion apps during the App Store’s first year and 5.2 million iPhones during the company’s fiscal third quarter.

Wolff is hoping the popularity of the device will help him double his company’s subscribership. “I’m hoping we can really gain exposure for ourselves,” he says.

Improve customer service
Many apps do more than draw attention to your product; they improve the customer’s experience. Jason Gossard, the lead administrator for the Circle School, a parent-owned and operated school in San Antonio, praises the utility of the school’s new free app, which is scheduled to launch in a couple weeks. Administrators will be able to use their smartphones to highlight upcoming school events and make speedy updates, he says. And parents will be able to receive updates from the school more easily. “Everyone who had an iPhone was excited about this,” he says.

Even if another firm profits from offering your company’s app, users still benefit from being able to access your company’s service with greater ease. Just ask Tobi Lutke, the CEO of Ottawa-based web site host Shopify. When an independent developer created Shopkeeper, an app that allows any of Shopify’s 5,000 customers to manage their inventories, more than 100 users downloaded the $4.99 app. Lutke says Shopkeeper and apps like it are good for his customers and his business. “The app allows small companies to operate more like larger e-commerce shops, which have dedicated staff to improve their workflow,” Lutke says. “With this technology, you can be very small and have the same technology as a big corporation.”

Create a revenue opportunity
Some apps present companies with new ways to lift profits, and others are revenue generators themselves. Blakely Long, the CEO of BetterQOL, a pain-management service in Bellaire, Texas, and her partner Brian Loftus, a neurologist, are banking that some of the estimated 33 million migraine sufferers will purchase their new app, iHeadache. The app, which costs $9.99 to download, identifies the type of headache a user has, based on their symptoms, the duration of their headache and the medication they may be taking. The app also generates reports which can be shared with physicians. “We are targeting neurologists and headache specialists, as they benefit from having better reports,” Loftus says.

Write to Diana Ransom at dransom@smartmoney.com

Brazen, bold and interesting self promotion

Are you doing something interesting or special?

Are you doing something for the community?

Are you going over and above what your customers expect?

If you are, then how will your customers and contacts, friends and family going to know if you don’t tell them?  My momma taught me growing up the rewards of being humble and in school we were told not to brag or people wouldn’t like us, so sometimes self-promotions feels a bit shameless!  However, in marketing, you have to be bold, you have to be your own best press agent -  and there is a skill to that!  You know what I say – “Marketing is simply telling people what you are doing”.  Now, we can disect that all day long and add to it a million times, but the bottom line is that if you are not doing anything, it is hard to have an interesting marketing message.  And if you ARE doing something, your clients and target audience need to know about it!

Shamless self-promotion, as some call it, or “tooting your own horn” is a necessity in any business, expecially for the small business owner and entrepreneur.  You have to get out there and shake up your community, be seen and heard.  Find a project you can wrap your arms around, put some soul into it and then tell everyone about it.  Your product or service alone may be worth telling about.  Create a buzz through your activity.

Remember, in this age of social networking – Twitter, Facebook, Plaxo, LinkedIn, Blogger, WordPress – (just to name the vehicles I use), we have the perfect platform to toot our own horns, BUT, and this is a BIG BUT, no one wants to be subjected to a canned, generic, lame, old-school sales pitch.  What is more important than your sales pitch is what you can offer as an expert in your field and how, through your communications,  you can develop relationships that last!

Love and Peace,

Sandy