CIS is looking for a part time employee - pls RT

Corporate Identity Solutions is looking for some part time help (10-15 hrs per week) in the Web development arena. The perfect candidate would have experience building web sites in Adobe Dreamweaver, Microsoft Expressions Web, and Microsoft FrontPage.  Experience with Adobe Photoshop is necessary and experience with Flash & Fireworks would be a plus.

This is a temporary position that would wrap up in late August or early September.

If you are interested please contact Michelle D’Attilio at michelle@identify-yourself.com

If Necessity is the Mother of Invention Then Expectation is the Mother of Satisfaction.

I’ll say it again, if necessity is the mother of invention then expectation is the mother of satisfaction, and the success of my business is completely dependant upon how satisfied my client is with their end product.

How often have you gotten annoyed, frustrated, or even livid because a product or service wasn’t as advertised (the “as seen on tv” syndrome), or wasn’t provided by the promised time (“we’ll be there between 9am and 3pm” only to have that turn into tomorrow, or next week)?

We have paid little to no money for advertising because quite frankly we are a small business and the costs of traditional advertising (print, mail, television, radio) can often be prohibitive, so we must rely almost solely on word of mouth. We have a website, a presence on both Facebook and Twitter, and regular emailing campaigns, but these don’t take away from the fact that we depend greatly on word of mouth marketing. This means that our clients not only have to be satisfied with what we have done for them but they need to be so satisfied that they would suggest us to their colleagues.

Now, we have been in business for 10 years and I would love to say that we have been successful because we put out a better product than any one of our competitors and that is why our clients suggest us to others. My ego would like to believe that, but I am pretty sure that isn’t the case. Don’t get me wrong, I would tell you that our product is as good and in many cases superior to our competitors, but everyone thinks (or at least hopes) that about their product, or they shouldn’t be in business. I actually think it goes a step further.  From a marketing standpoint (and from any other standpoint) satisfaction is based on expectation.

It’s pretty simple: We tell our clients what they can expect, when they can expect it, and how much it is going to cost. Then we deliver. We don’t overpromise and we NEVER under deliver. We’ve been known to routinely over deliver (adding a feature, completing the project early, etc.), to the delight of our clients, and that gives a great boost to the positive word of mouth advertising that we thrive on. When the clients’ expectations are managed well they are satisfied, and when they are satisfied they tell someone else about us and we get more business. And so the world goes ‘round and we’re all happy.  Isn’t that the way it should be? ;)

Best Tweet Contest Winner Announced!

Well Milwaukee, you hit us with your best tweet and we have a winner! Some of the tweets came in via DM and broke some of the rules (you know who you are!), and while those were very funny, they had to be disqualified!  The decision was unanimous and I am happy to announce that juergen_talks (Juergen Schreck) is the winner of the Best Tweet contest and the 2 tickets to the Bucks game!  The winning tweet read:

@juergen_talks I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.

Nice work Juergen!  We would be remiss not to give an honorable mention which goes out to Angie Chaplin and read:

@angiechaplin Twitter is the place to meet some of the best friends you’ve never met

Great job! Hope to see you all at the TweetUp on April 7th at the Iron Horse and on April 8th to support our Milwaukee Bucks!  RSVP here http://kl.am/6k

A Beautiful Mind and a Hot Blonde, What Does This Have to do With My Business?

Years ago I saw the movie “A Beautiful Mind” there is one scene in particular that has always stuck with me, the bar scene where the boys are all trying to pick up a girl.  There is this hot little blonde number with some of her girlfriends and all the guys want a shot at her. They decide that they’ll all have a go and may the “best man win”.  To back up their plan, they quote the father of modern economics, Adam Smith, and state that “in competition individual ambition serves the common good”, thinking that if they don’t get the blond they will be able to pick up one of her friends .  This idea is based on the fact that everyone will follow the person who succeeds and all in turn will benefit.

John Nash, the main character in the movie decides this is the wrong approach and if they do that, then at best one guy gets the girl. However, if they work together, and hit on the blonde’s friends, they are all likely to get a girl.  John Nash took Adam Smith’s theory a step further and stated that the ”market benefits when one does what is good for him, and also for the group”. Basically, if we all use our ambition to meet our own goals along with the collective goals of the group we all walk away with a girl.  For me, this is the basis on which social networking is built and if you enter this arena with the purpose of bettering yourself and the group everyone wins.

So I guess the moral of the story is that we should take our focus off the hot blonde (or blond, for the ladies) and work together so we can all get a piece….of the pie that is! :) No disrespect to blondes in the room, I used to be one myself. It’s really just a metaphor people.

Come down and work on this concept at our TweetUp next week Tuesday, April7th at The Iron Horse Hotel and join us for some fun on April 8th at the Bucks game! RSVP here -  http://kl.am/6k

#besttweet - Hit Me With Your Best Tweet Contest

Corporate Identity Solutions and the Milwaukee Bucks are teaming up for a two day TweetUp! As most of you know, the April 7th TweetUp will be held at The Iron Horse Hotel for business and Twitter networking and the next night you can join us for socializing and basketball at The Bradley Center with your Milwaukee Bucks!

Corporate Identity Solutions has a set of free tickets for the April 8th game and we will be giving them away to the person who can come up with the best tweet. Now there are a few rules….

1. You have to be registered to attend the April 7th TweetUp by March 30th
2. You have to attend the TweetUp to pick up your tickets
3. The tweet can be on any subject but let’s stay appropriate, at the very least use symbols instead of foul language :)
4. The deadline for submissions is March 30 and we will announce the winner on March 31. This way you all still have time to buy your tickets for the game

Last thing you need to know….you must, must, must hash tag the tweet with #besttweet & @reply us  (@identifyourself or @identify_urself) . Yes this takes up a lot of characters but we know you are are clever crew and can do it. We may allow for 2 part tweets but they must be twice as good!

So here is your challenge Milwaukee do your best to impress and….Hit Me With Your Best Tweet! 


Register for the TweetUp at http://identify-yourself.com/tweetupRSVP.html

Small Businesses at the Milwaukee TweetUp to Cure the Economy! Well, it's a start.

Everywhere you go all you hear is how bad the economy is and how it is going to get worse. It’s all doom and gloom out there and quite frankly, I am sick of it. Everyone is sitting around talking about how bad things are, I want to talk to the people who are doing something about it (and I am not talking about the government) I am talking about small business owners. These are the people who are putting themselves out there everyday working as hard as they can to be a productive part of society and they have the passion and the drive we need to turn things around. I know this because, I am one of those people and this is why I think it is going to work.

Follow my train of thought here, finding a job in this market is very difficult which leaves many new college grads without options and large companies are downsizing leaving many experienced employees out of work. These are all potential small business owners, couple that with the void those large companies will have in the area that was downsized and you have an opportunity, and that is all that we need.

If you give me an opportunity I am going to run with it and if you don’t give me an opportunity I am going to just find it elsewhere. I am going to make my company a success and in doing so I am going to make other companies successful and together we will bring back a stable economy. If you don’t believe in the power of the small business owners check out these numbers http://www.homebusinessmag.com/newsstand/government-and-sba/small-businesses-drive-us-economy .

Now, again, I am going to push the TweetUp in Milwaukee on April 7th at The Iron Horse and I want to make it very clear that this TweetUp is not ”my cause”, it is everyone’s cause.  It is the basis on which business gets done and our economy survives. We do business with people we like, we find out that we like people through social networking. The success of this event is based on each individual’s success at the event and I want a success! That doesn’t happen without a little work from the attendees. The more people we have attend the event the more opportunity there is for all of the attendees. So I ask you to be as passionate as I am about the TweetUp and promote it. Use it to increase your own visibility, use it to show your clients or your boss that you are proactive and involved. Let’s make this the best attended TweetUp in Milwaukee to date, let’s network and do business, make connections and prove that we are doing our part to put this economy back on its feet.

RSVP for the Milwaukee TweetUp at http://www.identify-yourself.com/tweetupRSVP.html and be a part of the success!

If you don't love it, you just don't understand it.....huh? What does that mean?

This week has been filled with meetings. Typically I would tell you that I hate meetings, I am a computer geek and feel most comfortable sitting by my computer communicating through email, test messages, Facebook, and Twitter but this week has been different. I have been meeting with people from the Milwaukee Twitter community and we have been discussing the power of social networking and this amazing city we live in.  

I have also been very busy talking up the TweetUp that we are planning. I am finding that some people get it and some people do not. I hate to quote a celebrity but not too long ago Gwyneth Paltrow said something to the effect of “if you don’t love it, then you just don’t understand it.” I remember thinking ”what the heck does that mean?”  Well, I finally understand. It would seem that I need to explain why I love the concept of this TweetUp and why I believe you should as well.   

My plan is to take all of the cool technology people who are on Twitter and have been for a while and connect them with the strong business people in the Milwaukee area who may or may not be on Twitter. Now I understand that many of these people may already be connected but in that case then, we are just reinforcing this connection. We are staring down the barrel of an ugly economy and I believe that small business can save us if we give it a chance to do so. Milwaukee is this amazing community and I believe that we have always used social networking to get business done. Twitter allows us to become uber social networkers and TweetUps allow us to convert that social networking into business opportunities. I love the idea of this TweetUp because I feel it is the a step in the right direction to make sure we all pull through the current economy and come out on the other side without too much bruising. Plus, the idea of being in a room with some of my favorite types of people is thrilling, after all I am a computer geek at heart. So I hope you will join us on April 7th at the Iron Horse because together we can do some really cool things.

To register for the TweetUp go to http://www.identify-yourself.com/tweetupRSVP.html

How I maintain my Twitter high and my business.

I have to say that I love Twitter and the other social platforms as well, but Twitter and Facebook especially. Probably because I am used to them or maybe because they seem to cater to my specific needs. When I first started on Twitter it felt like a high, a constant stream of information on topics of my choosing being sent to me every minute. I was high on the Twitter information stream, reading everything that seemed even remotely connected to me. However, like any good high, this too must come to an end. Not because the information isn’t still streaming in but because I actually have to accomplish things throughout the day.

I’d like to sit back and soak up all the information out there but that isn’t going to pay the bills so I came up with a little idea. It is really very simple. I added a folder to my favorites bar called “Things to Read” and anytime I came across an article that looked good I just put it in the folder. When I had a few free minutes or just needed a break I would open the folder and do some reading.

This was actually working for a few days, but didn’t seem to be good enough. So I decided to take it a step further and organize that folder into sub folders based on topic. Now I can sort the articles and pull up anything that might be pertinent at the moment. I now have a “Design Ideas” folder, a “Gadget” folder, a “Technology” folder, and a “Social Media” folder among others. It’s has allowed me to organize the streaming information into a small library that I can use whenever I need to. I even have a folder called “Fun Stuff” for when I need a mental break.

You are probably thinking, wow this woman sounds like she is a little too anal for her own good, and you’d probably be right but at least I figured out a way to manage my Twitter high and maintain my business! Speaking of a Twitter high, if you are in Milwaukee on April 7th don’t miss our TweetUp at the Iron Horse Hotel, you can register here http://www.identify-yourself.com/tweetupRSVP.html

Milwaukee Area TweetUp

Hello all,  Jeanette and I have been very busy in our geek world but let me remind you that very cool things occur when geeks get busy, one of those thing is Facebook. 

As most of you know, Jeanette and I have been working through our little social marketing experiment which has lead us to Twitter.com which has open our eyes to a massive world of new information. We have quickly expanded our networks and made a lot of fantastic contacts that we are exchanging information with on a daily basis. These are people we didn’t even know 3 weeks ago! It has been an amazing process.

To that end, we have decided to host a Milwaukee based Tweetup. What? What the @#$% is that? Well a Tweetup is when you actually get together face to face with the people you network with on Twitter and the people those people network with. Mostly it is business and technology people getting together to help each other out and perhaps get some new business. 

Now it doesn’t have to be strictly business and technology, everyone is welcome and if you aren’t on Twitter but are thinking you’d like to be this is a good introduction. We have been very blessed that The Iron Horse Hotel is as excited as we are and has graciously allowed us to host this event at their fantastic location.  If you haven’t been there you need to see this beautiful piece of art that is also a hotel. We will be working through the details of the event in the next week and will have much more information to follow but for now I can tell you this Date:

Tuesday, April 7th

Location: The Iron Horse Hotel

Time: 5:00 PM P

lease forward this information on to anyone think might be interested! We are working out some of the details and will have a registration page available very soon! Thanks - Michelle

Biz v personal Tweet-what is appropriate? Please RT

My business partner Jeanette and I have been working on this whole social networking project and we have been discussing what is and isn’t an appropriate statement (i.e. tweet or status update) for a business person to make and if the definition of “appropriate” changes based on the type of business. 

We both have Facebook accounts that are personal as well as a business Facebook account (http://tinyurl.com/ct2fjl  - feel free to check it out and become a fan), we also both have Twitter accounts (identify_urself & identfyourself) these are more business then personal. So, in a world where people are posting what they had for breakfast, what is appropriate?

Obviously it is to our benefit to post useful information and to not post anything that would be considered offensive, but is it ok for me to post a personal activity occasionally? Something like “Sitting courtside at bball game, LeBron James isn’t as big as I thought” - I think that was an actual post from last Friday. Also, I’ve always felt that based on my vocation, I was granted a little more leeway than say a money manager. Since I am in a “creative field” I am a creative person and that in general that allowed me some space to make statements that weren’t always geared towards business and occasionally were provocative and/or off the wall. Am I off base with this thought process? Please feel free to weigh in.  Is it ok to mix business tweets/updates with personal?

Vote here - http://www.micropoll.com/akira/mpview/547852-143069

Check us out online at www.identify-yourself.com