Human Capital and Local Economic Constraints

In my work as a freelancer and service provider, I frequently find myself in competition with overseas talent whose rates don’t even meet minimum wage requirements in the United States.  While I am all for supporting the global economy, it is impossible for me to meet their prices.  Sometimes my clients decide to go for the lowest cost bid, even though they would prefer to work with me … or so they say.  And sometimes my clients return to me with a partially completed project and a story to tell.

What is funny about this is that there are also overseas buyers who know they could acquire talent for a lower rate who grasp the importance of working with someone who is readily available and also has skills that meet the needs of their projects.  I’ve delivered projects to business owners in third world countries who admitted this was true.

In the early 1990s, when corporations began to shut down divisions of their companies and eliminate jobs, to subsequently open them up again on foreign soil where labor was cheaper, there was a public outcry.  Corporations were accountable only to their shareholders, however, so the devaluation of human capital became a common method of meeting those demands.  And what has been the effect on the global economy?  It is my opinion that liberal credit policies are not the only contributors to the current crisis.

Wikipedia defines Human Capital as being the stock of skills and knowledge embodied in the ability to perform labor so as to produce economic value.  The wiki goes on to say that it is the skills and knowledge of a worker acquired through education and experience.  I acknowledge that some overseas service providers have equivalent skills, education and experience to a US based service provider.  I also acknowledge that some overseas talent fall far short of the line drawn in the sand.

Until the effect of offshore outsourcing begins to affect your income, it is easy to explain away choices that keep a local service provider from working with you or declare that US labor prices need to be lowered so offshore competition is healthy.  I value your insightfulness and honor your decisions.  After all, you are in business and the economics of your projects balanced with your sales will define the return on your investment.

I would like to present another side of the coin for your consideration.  If your project is intended to target the market whose labor rates you feel are inflated, your sales may be affected because your target market has to make difficult choices about how to allocate the income they are able to attract.

In the end, there always is a balance to things.

Laughter and My Story Marketing?

Listening to the Prairie Home Companion program today, I experienced a bit of home sickness. The program aired from the Minnesota State Fair. As Garrison Keillor spoke of fall, apples, harvest moons, and the fair, all the sights, sounds, and smells from my home state and that event rushed to my senses. These are all pleasant memories. You can take the girl out of Minnesota but you can’t take Minnesota out of the girl, I guess.

Garrison Keillor is a delightful story teller. He may even be remembered with the likes of Mark Twain, eventually. His stories have a way of creating empathy for his predicaments and the laughter that bubbles up when imagining his scenarios is totally spontaneous and impossible to suppress.

How does this relate to Online Marketing? We’ve all heard of “My Story Marketing” by now. This is a method used to evoke empathy, build excitement and gain sales as a result. I’ve sure read some long-winded sales letters in my day. None of them were happy stories, like Garrison Keillor’s witty tales, and most were so tedious and predictable that I didn’t even finish reading them, let alone feel compelled to press the buy button.

In fact, the recipe for “My Story Marketing” is to begin with a problem that you have faced in order to grab people’s attention. After doing this, you can explain what you’ve done to effect a change and how your life is now. Supposedly, this will inspire your visitors to buy your product or join your business. Having never tried it myself, there is no way to know how effective it really is but there are enough proponents of the tactic that it is worth evaluating.

In my former career as a Realtor®, I learned that there were two ways to write compelling advertisements. One was to use a headline that evoked fear.  The other type of headline permitted people to imagine or dream.

Statistically, most of my guests came to an open house because they saw the sign while they were in the neighborhood or were neighbors who were merely curious to see the inside of the house but, in my experiments with print advertising, I found that using the positive headline drew more people in, if they came as a result of seeing the ad. If “My Story Marketing” is effective, it would be interesting to see the split test results, assuming they tried a page with a positive and happy story too.

So let’s apply my real estate marketing experiment to Internet Marketing. When we have internet real estate, we use many different methods to bring our websites to the attention of surfers. In a way, some of our website traffic is similar to people driving by an open house sign and deciding to stop in along their way. How are they affected by their visit?

Generally, you have less than a minute to entice someone to stay at your site and have a look around so the look and feel of your site is your curb appeal. This includes color, font, image, and layout choices. If your page is too slow to load, uses garish colors, or has too many blinking ads, visitors will abandon it quickly. But that is aesthetics and one person’s “ugly” is another person’s “beautiful” so you’ll need to experiment with things to see what works best in your niche.  More importantly, look and feel is not what helps you to get income from your website.

For several reasons, the most important part of your page is your content. The area above the fold (i.e., seen without the need to scroll down) is critical real estate so you need to use it wisely. Do you want to frighten your visitors into reading on and possibly taking action or would you rather build a relationship with them established through interest, truth, value, and trust? From my viewpoint, the latter goes miles further than the former.

I’m advocating that Internet Marketers start creating “My Story Marketing” stories that are entertaining. We all need more joy in our lives, don’t we? Enlightenment or laughter must be equally compelling and writing about things like that certainly is much more fun for the author too. Current studies indicate that leveraging humor can lead to a potentially big payoff. Social scientists have long documented that people who are perceived as being witty, clever and funny are destined for popularity and greater success in their work and relationships.

If you actually have had a difficult problem and your business or product has resolved it, by all means write the traditional “My Story Marketing” story. I caution you to be honest in the results you claim, however. Credibility is very easy to lose and nearly impossible to recover.

What Do We Do to Get Income?

When we consider the amount of time we spend imagining and pursuing success, is the accounting a fair balance?  Putting it another way, do you spend too much of your time working to get income?

Pondering the difference between what we want and what we have can lead us to inspiration.  The gift of human ingenuity and creativity is a blessing.  That is the truth.  There is joy in bringing our ideas to life.  Hours of refining our vision, laying out a plan for monetization and developing our product bring great satisfaction.  The aroma of success lingers with each accomplishment along the way.  We taste it when we get income as a result of our efforts.

When we look up from our work, what do we see?   Has our success changed us and, if so, is the change positive?

Take a few minutes to watch this video.

 

The video evoked a strong emotional response.  It seems appropriate to share it with my readers for, no matter what you are dreaming of, I don’t want you to ever lose the fire in your belly that inspires you to continue to create more.

The Size of Spokane

This post is not about business or marketing in any sense other than we have to pursue our passions to live our life dreams. Sometimes, we are so caught up in our material pursuits, we do not take the time to pause and consider what we may be missing by choosing to not be aware of what is beautiful in our midst.

This poem arrived in an email subscription from The Writer’s Almanac years ago. I have never forgotten how this profound poem affected me when I first read it and have since shared it with many of my friends and colleagues.

 
The Size of Spokane 
The baby isn’t cute.
In fact he’s a homely little pale and headlong stumbler.
Still, he’s one of us-the human beings stuck on flight 295 (Chicago to Spokane);
and when he passes my seat twice at full tilt this then that direction,
I look down from Lethal Weapon 3 to see just why.
He’s running back and forth across a sunblazed circle on the carpet-something brilliant,
fallen from a porthole.
So! it’s light amazing him, it’s only light,
despite some three and one half hundred people, propped in rows for him to wonder at;
it’s light he can’t get over, light he can’t investigate enough, however many zones he runs across it, flickering himself.
The umpteenth time I see him coming,
I’ve had just about enough;
but then he notices me noticing and stops-one fat hand on my armrest-to inspect the oddities of me.
****
Some people cannot hear.
Some people cannot walk.
But everyone was sunstruck once, and set adrift.
Have we forgotten how astonishing this is?
so practiced all our senses we cannot imagine them?
foreseen instead of seeing all the all there is?
Each spectral port, each human eye is shot through with a hole,
and everything we know goes in there, where it feeds a blaze.
In a flash the baby’s old;
Mel Gibson’s hundredth comeback seems less clever;
all his chases and embraces narrow down, while we fly on (in our plain radiance of vehicle)
toward what cannot stay small forever.
 

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The Girl Who Silenced The World at the United Nations

This young lady has a message.

When we consider the things that are important, the reasons why we want to succeed, are we thinking of those things that really matter and how we might do a little something every day to make that better?

How Do You Define Success?

Many of you who visit my blog will notice that there is a philosophical bent to my message online.  It is part of who I am, being an introspective sort of person.  As I was walking along a local path this morning, I found myself pondering the definition of success.  What resulted from this reflection was no less than an epiphany to me.

I was in a conversation with a friend yesterday afternoon.  This person is also on a spiritual path as well as being a business associate of mine.  He has an idea about what conveys a message of success and attracts people to each other.  I appreciated his point of view and relate on many levels to what he said but the fact remains that success has a personal definition for us all. 

Sometimes we have to wander through a few turnstiles that don’t necessarily lead to the sort of success we had envisioned but each leg of our journey is necessary for us to evolve and grow.  Isn’t the journey more important than a destination?

For many, success is closely coupled with the amount of money or material possessions they have gathered and can point to as a testimonial about their successes.  Their achievements are portrayed in the form of vehicles they drive or places that they live.  While money is useful and facilitates a lifestyle, money is a false God that has been idolized by our society for far too long.

Along my way, I have become acutely aware of something that I feel is important to share.  I have met many people who define their success though an identity or role.  That might be as a parent, spouse, lover, child, sibling, professional, or any one of a number of other choices we make about how we are living our lives.  In fact, most roles are temporary and are all too frequently influenced by people, places and things outside ourselves.  When that landscape shifts and too much importance has been placed on that particular identity, we can lose our way.

Underneath everything external in life is Being.   As humans, we are blessed with the gift of self-awareness.  This begins in the crib when we first discover our toes.  As our awareness matures, we learn to notice other things about ourselves.  Not everything is tactile or visible.  Whether or not we like what we discover, the choice is ours to make as to whether or not we want to keep that as part of our core way of Being.

We are all stimulated and energized differently.  When we are one with our passions, there is nothing that can stifle our creativity or keep us from being successful.  For me, success is not measured by money, possessions, identity or the vastness of my circle of friends.  It is measured by the amount of TIME that I have to freely pursue my passions.  

I’d like to end this post with a question to answer for yourselves. What defines success for you?

Dream Do Have

In our youth, we are educated by our sphere of influence that the road to success is to get a good education, find a good job and work hard until you retire. 

How is that working for you so far?

Diligence is an important component to succeeding in life, regardless of your goal, but it is much more important to understand WHY you want to succeed.  Money should not be your only cause.

When I was first asked to articulate my reasons for wanting to succeed as a self-employed person, I truly put some thought into that document.  I considered all the things that were important to me.  I laid out all the dreams that were pertinent and still with me after years of living and learning. 

There is a point of view that suggests that you must first BE what you desire to be.  This decision leads you to DO things that allow you to HAVE your goal.  I liked that, for it is a simple formula. 

In my life, I have modified it to be DREAM – DO – HAVE for our dreams are worthwhile and guide us toward our futures.  And, face it, without dreams, life is dull.

So, I ask you to ponder, what are your dreams and WHY are those dreams important to you?  Put this into writing and refer to it often.  As long as you have sight of your dreams, you will DO what it takes to HAVE them come true for you.

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