Digital Organization

I received a phone call about an order we placed in April, 2019. We are restoring the interior of a 1962 Oldsmobile F85 Cutlass. We discussed all the components needed and thought everything was ordered with the company out West.

The pieces are finally arriving a year later and we do not have carpet. We discussed carpet when ordering the interior. It was a lengthy discussion because I considered going with a different color from the original. In the end, we stayed with the original pile and color. How did this happen? It happened because at the time the order was placed I was in the final stages of our annual show. I quickly reviewed the three separate invoices and I missed that the carpet was not on any one of them. Fast forward to today, I needed to find the orders/invoices. I occasionally digitally filed paperwork, not all of it in its proper place. I see now there are a lot of papers that need to be stored in a better place for easy retrieval.  

This made me realize the importance of digital organization. I have worked on this for years. One of the many challenges is the form of the digital organization. Do I use folders online, platforms like Evernote and Dropbox. Do I depend on cloud storage, should there be an external hard drive or flash drive that contains the information? 

I am not alone in this. We have information at our fingertips. This is both a blessing and a curse. We can get answers in an instant and this creates a need for instant gratification. It speeds everything up and leaves little time to put things in their proper place. It creates an “I will get to that later” mindset. 

The blog posts this week will feature each digital option; the features and benefits of each one. If there is a particular topic you would like to see covered in depth, please comment below.

Marketing in the World of Digital Information Overload

One would think in the year 2019 with all the digital platforms available that marketing would be easy. Reaching your target audience as simple as hitting a few buttons. Build a social presence by being active on social media. All these things are really basic so why is marketing so difficult today?

Money. The 1980’s feel like ancient history but things were easier. Specific channels; newspaper, magazine, radio, TV, and direct mail were the major players. You received media kits and price plans to market your product or service on these channels. Something else that was part of the marketing strategy was advertising agency discount rates. An ad agency could offer their service to a client at no additional advertising cost because the channels gave a percentage of the advertising dollars spent back to the agency and everyone was a winner. 

In 2019, money is still the main player in the game; however, the major players, or channels of today, have changed. We now live in a world of social media and if you do not have a social media presence, you are invisible. Advertising discounts for ad agencies still exist but the average business owner cannot afford to promote their product or service on TV. Print media; i.e., newspapers, magazines, and direct mail are readily available online as well as in print. Will your advertising dollars on these channels reach your target audience? Maybe and that is a big risk to take.

What about social media and what is the problem? Algorithms. Facebook and Instagram are two of the biggest players in the social media game. It often feels like spending advertising dollars on these channels is like playing darts. What impact will your ad dollars have in getting your product, service, or event seen by the people you want to reach? How will that algorithm affect your results? Do you need to spend money to be seen and more important, why should the small business have to spend huge amounts of money to be seen? 

There are a lot of questions with very few answers. This is an experiment; using a blog and dynamic websites to reach a target audience. Websites became static when smartphones took over communication. You hold the power to engage in social media, check email, text and talk, search the internet, listen to music and podcasts wherever you are because that power exists in your smartphone. Will a dynamic website capture the audience you want to reach? Will a blog dedicated solely to information, and not a platform monetized by advertisers, build engagement? Can social media be utilized in a way that traffic can be driven to a website or blog? These are the questions and time will tell what the answers are. 

The entrepreneur:  dreamccc

Team Michelangelo

For the Love of Pets and People