Lots of projects have been in the works, and that's taken my time away from my own site.

But I realize that it's as much a discipline and focus issue as any other project that I want to accomplish.

SO... that being said... I've segmented out my blog into some different categories... and I am taking a much different approach.

I've wrestled with the how/what issue here for long enough.

At one point, I was in a quandry about how to leverage my own blog... do I want it to be personal? Professional? Business-related?

Welllllll... my penchent for that dastardly compartmentalization that I fight on a daily basis has been overpowered!

My blog is ME.

And what I am is a marketing guy, business guy, techie guy, husband, dad, innovator, trendspotter, and class clown.

So strap yourself in.

I live on a small farm outside of a fairly small community... okay it's pretty tiny. Our county seat has like 6,000 residents in the city limits. When you go into a business on Main Street, it's like stepping back into time. Even though I am about 45 minutes outside of a major metro downtown area, I chose to live out in the proverbial "sticks" for a whole bunch of reasons.
 
One morning a couple weeks back, I hopped into the car and headed down the road to hear the dreaded FLOP FLOP FLOP of a dead tire.
 
I did an about face and headed...

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I can't be certain how many bottles of celebratory champagne Matt Rutledge had downed before he penned the most awesome internal email from a CEO ever about the sale of woot.com to Amazon.

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All this social media this and that... everyone is a wannabe internet marketing guru this or that... it's enough to make me crazy sometimes.

So I started looking around for people in smaller, non-marketing related niches that are kicking butt with their social media presence, and I found two that you have probably never heard of - both leveraging social media to the hilt, and both in completely different, unrelated niches.

Anyone who knows me to any level beyond text on the screen, knows that one of my trademarks is my Aussie boonie hat. I've finally worn out the old Panama Jack that I have been sporting for the past 3 years, and I thought it might be time to splurge on a newer lid for the melon.

So, I embarked on this quest to find me a new safari style hat, maybe in leather. I looked at a whole bunch of online retailers, but still didn't find anything that tripped my trigger.

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Let’s take a much deeper look at the concept of "business process".

We tend to think of the idea of "process" as something negative or mundane. For example, the "legal process", where we deal with life issues like traffic citations, divorce, or even civil lawsuits. It's generally not viewed in a positive light. Or, we associate the term with some bureaucracy like government offices - the "building permit process", or the "tax audit process". At any rate, the word itself doesn't really represent concepts that we regard as positive or redeeming

However, I previously discussed the idea of business process being essential to the success and growth of ...

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Far too often, marketing people treat marketing like it exists in this magical, utopian fairyland vacuum, somehow or another separate from the rest of the business. It's like Uncle Daddy inbreeding. The more inbred it gets, the weaker the DNA.

But marketing goes so much deeper into the intrinsics of a successful business operation. I try to use an abstracted model that gets applied to each area based on a very simple formula. The core formula can then be applied to any tactical marketing area.

I dig even deeper by implementing marketing strategies within a CPI (continuous process improvement) model roughly approximated on proven TQM philosophies like those taught by Deming, Six Sigma, Lean (Toyota Production Systems), Balanced Scorecard, etc...

I am not sure why...

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Most small businesses got their start because the owner hit the street and pounded on doors. They had to do whatever it took to make sales happen because their very survival depended upon the success or failure of those efforts. A person can get pretty bold in the pursuit of their survival, and that’s the barbarian entrepreneur that drags the business into existence, kicking and screaming. But that's a very different...

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I've realized just how tough it has become for business, and particularly small business, to market and sell its products and services in nearly any niche.

Sure, the uncertain economy has really made it hard. Cash and credit are tight and people simply aren’t buying like before. But the problem started before uncertain economic conditions changed business. A lot of companies were finding that their marketing initiatives were already in serious trouble.

First of all, the internet has really become a serious tool for any customer in any market or niche. The availability of volumes of information with a single click in a search engine literally...

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