These days it seems it’s hard to know when the best time to do your holiday shopping is between Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Free Shipping Day and Super Saturday, which are all made up days created to boost holiday sales.

Do you jump right in after Thanksgiving and knock out everything on your list? Or do you hold out for possibly better deals with the chance of not getting what you want? Or are you like me this year and got a really late start and are hoping for the best?

The National Retail Federation anticipates holiday sales this year will increase 4.1% over last year. Holiday retail sales reports have been very mixed this year. It started with a disappointing Black Friday, which is typically the busiest shopping day of the year. But despite a slow Thanksgiving weekend, November sales were actually up slightly over last year. It seems this can be attributed to an expansion in the sales season with retailers offering deep discounts as early as Halloween. With spotty sales reports so far this holiday season, retailers are now banking on Super Saturday, the last Saturday before Christmas, to make up for slow sales so far this year. In fact, according to ShopperTrak, Super Saturday is expected to surpass Black Friday as the top revenue-generating day of 2014 for brick-and-mortar stores. That means stores have to rely on procrastinators like me to save the holiday shopping season.

While the forecast for in-store sales is good this year, on-line holiday sales forecasts continue to grow year after year with Cyber Monday now being the biggest online shopping day of the year. Online sales are expected to grow 8 – 11% this year. The surge in online shopping shows holiday shoppers are in search of deals that are most convenient.

With lower gas prices and unemployment rates at a six-year low, retailers are hoping shoppers will have a little more cash to spend this holiday season. And with Christmas falling on Thursday this year, most people will have Friday off which will give them another opportunity to take advantage of after Christmas sales.

We’ll have to wait a few more days to see how the holiday shopping season ends up this year. In the meantime, I’ve got to get to it … Happy Shopping!

We look forward to the holidays all year long. They are a wonderful time for festive gatherings, re-visiting family memories and traditions, and creating new ones. Whether you celebrate Christmas, Chanukkah or Kwanzaa, the virtues of each of these holidays are celebrated for weeks and months in advance.

However, preparations for these celebrations can really zap our time. On any given day, the challenges presented by Father Time during the holidays can be intense. A Hollywood producer might love to document the chaos of a holiday reality show — imagine Gordon Ramsay trying to handle the heat in the kitchen while simultaneously shopping, decorating, wrapping, delivering and entertaining!

And beware! Just when you think you’ve wrangled things into manageable chaos, factor in a last minute curveball, because Someone. Will. Get. Sick.

It’s tempting to throw in the towel and let yourself get voted off the island and retreat. But with a little patience, pluck and determination, you can survive the holiday jungle and actually enjoy your holidays!

Here are a few of our tips on how to get through the season in one piece and beat Father Time at his own game:

• Drink calming tea – it’s vital for survival.
• Pay attention to behaviors. Delegate the right tasks to the right people. And, by all means, bring in “special teams” when necessary.
• These days are long, people! Avoid the jitters and get an extra boost of sustainable energy with a Radiant Red Glow (with jalapeno) from The GEM.
• Survivors will be welcomed back into civilization and rewarded with the rejuvenation gleaned from a good night’s sleep. On The Porch, we love the comfort and feel of crisp percale Egyptian cotton sheets. Lyric by Peacock Alley are our faves.

So enjoy the chaos and the glamour of the holidays, but remember, when it all comes down to it – there is a reason for the season. Take a deep breath, grab a mug and position your children under each arm, because “It’s a Wonderful Life” is truly what we have.

Digital Summit Dallas

This week, our team had the opportunity to attend the Dallas Digital Summit, the region’s largest digital gathering, to re-enforce our digital insight strong hold.

Attendees were from a diverse range of organizations including national brands, agencies, technology, media, B2B providers, associations, nonprofits and start-ups. 

The conference was two days of jammed pack information all things digital insight ~ from SEO, email, mobile, social, analytics to cross-channel campaigns, trends and overall digital strategies.

Here’s the top 10 take-ways the team will be rockin’ on the porch in 2015:
1)   It is Search Everything Optimization not Search Engine Optimization
2)   Local SEO is absolutely vital for any business with a physical location
3)   Everyone wants their emails to be meaningful! Change your email strategy and get it opened
4)   Social media is not elective any more
5)   Employees can be the biggest brand ambassadors
6)   Create a behavioral statement to compliment your mission and vision
7)   Watch your inauthentic dislikers ~ it’s ok to ask why they don’t love you anymore
8)   2015 trend watch: more video, more spend on social
9)   Make it pervasive, participatory, personalized and prescriptive
10) Wheel and Spoke – Cross Channel is essential

Need to get started on your 2015 digital plan? Let’s get together on the porch and rock it out.

How is Thanksgiving and the holiday season already upon us?

It’s hard not to go full speed from now until the end of the year trying to get it all done – holiday shopping, end of the year goals and quotas at work, holiday festivities, family commitments … the list goes on and on. As much as we might have going on during this hectic holiday season, Thanksgiving is a good time to stop, take a breath and reflect on the experiences and things in our lives that have brought us to this point and most importantly, to be grateful.

Oftentimes things seem harder than they are. Being grateful can help put things into perspective. Being thankful and expressing gratitude will improve your life.

Take the time to be thankful each and every day, not just on Thanksgiving.

It will make you appreciate the good things in your life and allow you to enjoy them to the fullest.

This Thanksgiving we are thankful for our team, families, friends, partners and clients who have appreciated us, pushed us to perform to new heights and have stuck with us. You are a gift to us. We are thankful and grateful for each and every one of you!

We wish you all the happiest of Thanksgivings!

Multitasking ~ The concept is fantastic. The temptation to work on multiple things at once is great. We all have many demands on our very finite productive time which battle with the seemingly endless list of things to do both at work and at home.

However, it turns out that multitasking is not the most efficient way to work. In fact, many tasks done simultaneously are not as well done, take longer and are more likely to have errors. According to Travis Bradberry in a recent article in Forbes, multitasking can not only be ineffective, but can cause damage to your career and ultimately your brain. Research done at Stanford University found that, “those who multitask a lot and actually feel it boosts their performance, were worse at multitasking than those who like to do a single thing at a time.”

Apparently our brains prefer a single focus.

But … there is a time and place for everything. There is one area where multitasking is not only desirable, but essential. Marketing. It’s critical to have each initiative working as hard as it can simultaneously to intrigue and motivate the consumer to engage. Creative advertising campaigns, artfully crafted messages and carefully chosen images should be designed to make the most of every platform they reach by optimizing key search words. When done well, the consumer will willingly follow, much like Alice trailing the White Rabbit down the rabbit hole and an enticing new world. Your world.

Lead consumers to your world with an effective marketing program. Once they have landed at the bottom of the rabbit hole and are again faced with the realities of looming deadlines and gnawing to do lists, they will agree that the distraction was worth the trip.

Chances are your business is using content marketing as part of your overall marketing plan. The objective of content marketing is to deliver valuable information that will engage your audience. Consumers are tuning out the more intrusive marketing tactics. What they really want is great, customer-focused information that helps them make a decision or solve a problem. That’s what content marketing delivers.

I actually like The Content Marketing Institute’s definition of content marketing the best: “Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.”

So when it comes to content marketing, as a marketing professional, your job is to create and share valuable, free content to attract and convert prospective buyers into customers and engage existing customers so they are repeat buyers. The content you create and share should be closely related to what you sell without selling.

The purpose is to build relationships, awareness, branding and overall establish your company as an expert in your industry. You want to educate people and gain their trust so they do business with you.

There are many types of content that form a content marketing strategy including:

• Blogging
• Guest blog posts
• Social media posts and sharing
• Email marketing
• Infographics
• PowerPoint presentations
• Podcasts
• Standard videos
• Micro-videos (i.e. Vine)
• Public Speaking
• Webinars
• Articles

It’s up to you to know what is the best way for your brand to reach those potential and current customers. Just remember the power of great content marketing can make a person stop, read, think and behave differently. The return on investment for content marketing can be huge if executed correctly. And, it really doesn’t take a significant investment!

Last week’s game in which the St. Louis Rams special teams faked the punt against the Seattle Seahawks to help win the game, highlights the strategic importance of specialization, and believe it or not this type of strategy can be applied to teams in the workplace.

Special teams are some of the most overlooked in football. They can however, make the difference in controlling the game. Their moving the advantage up and down the field can lead to the big win. They are specialized and trained in their purpose. Whether punting the ball deep, keeping the opponent in a poor field position or making those final, last second field goals – they do something that the rest of the team cannot.

What makes special teams special? Practice, training, more practice, more training.

In this age of Do it Yourself (DYI), technology provides instruction on pretty much anything. Google has become the “go to” for immediate answers on how to accomplish an unknown task. No longer do we have to slog through piles of research. We can learn anything from how to reupholster a chair, how to tweet or learn how to sharpen our Excel skills. It’s great to be able to have access to this wealth of knowledge. But it does not guarantee the level of proficiency that only time, focus and mentoring can provide.

In order to create a winning strategy, become a leader and grow your small business, remember you can’t be all things to all people. It is critical to know when to call in the special teams.

You may only call on your experts for such specialized projects such as branding and marketing strategy and execution or human resources. As your business grows and time becomes more precious, you may use those special teams on a more permanent outsourcing basis to keep your eye on growth and innovation.

Whatever the case, when you need a game changer, call in special teams.

We were excited to meet with a prospective client partner and learn more about their branding and marketing needs. The company is in the B2B space.

Well into the conversation, my pulse began to race, my leg started to shake and my voice rose an octave.

You see, they have been meeting with several potential marketing partners and being very thorough about their due diligence in selecting the right one. One agency told them that they could … wait for it … manage and execute all their email marketing for the entire year for an annual fee if they handed over all the email content in one meeting.

Whoa! Really?!?!

It sounded good to the prospective client. This was:

• Very cost effective
• Low effort on their part
• Efficient with their time
• Worry-free. They wouldn’t have to think about their email marketing for an entire year.

Yes, friends, but this is wrong in so. many. ways. Hence, me physically reacting to this idea.

Effective email marketing campaigns are, among other things:

• Useful. If you are sending content to your audience that is several months old, you are missing the boat. “We try to include something useful in every email,” says Ben Chestnut of MailChimp. “If the announcement was totally useless, let’s at least give the recipient a case study, or something educational (even if it points to some other resource).”
• Fresh. Our world is changing daily. What is relevant or newsworthy today is not going to be tonight or tomorrow, never mind months from now.
• Personal and relevant. Your current and potential customers’ needs and businesses are constantly evolving. What they want and is the crisis du jour changes hourly. You may learn something in a meeting or on a call with them that you have never thought of before that could be a new product or service offering for your company or a nugget of wisdom for your next company email. Sorry, too late, you can only submit your content once a year … Ugh …

The reality is email marketing takes experience, work and expertise. The good news is we’re here to make it easy, effective and right for your brand.

What does it mean to be an entrepreneur? These eight innocent words are like loaded dice.

The word entrepreneur immediately brings to mind some obvious choices: Steve Jobs, Oprah Winfrey, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates. Melinda Gates has also earned her own place at the table with her philanthropic and global development efforts via the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

These folks are true forces of nature.

What landed them in this spot?

Talk to any successful entrepreneur and you will notice familiar traits. Entrepreneurs are driven by passion, not money. According to Tony Hsieh, founder and CEO of Zappos, “Chase the vision, not the money, the money will follow you.”

There is a myriad of research, articles and opinions citing successful traits of an entrepreneur. Most are variations of the same them:

• Passion
• Imagination
• Vision
• Tenacity
• Self Confidence
• Resilience

All packed with determination, perseverance and huge dollop of grit.

Lest you think it a glamorous endeavor, being an entrepreneur also means late nights, early mornings and everything in between. But the rewards of watching your vision come to life and grow supercede all else.

According to Eric T Wagner to be a successful entrepreneur is to, “Think Big and be Bold.” We would tend to agree.

Do you have what it takes?

I recently came across an article on CNN’s website titled, “Facebook launched my startup” talking about entrepreneurs who relied exclusively on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to start their small businesses. The story featured five small businesses and, as I flipped through each of them, up popped a picture of a friend and her business partner and their Dallas-based, three-and-a-half-year-old business Smocked Auctions. Their success in a short period of time is a true testament of how social media alone can have a profound effect on businesses.

After they used their initial investment to buy inventory to sell, Smocked Auctions had no extra money for marketing and advertising so they turned to Facebook and began weekly auctions to sell their goods. Almost instantly they attracted 20,000 followers and the rest is history. They now have more than 450,000 followers on Facebook, 10 full-time employees and are on track to do $5 million in sales this year. And although they have added an e-commerce site, Facebook still generates 65% to 70% of their sales.

Now, it’s hard to think of life before social media even though many sites aren’t even ten years old! But it has become pretty clear that social media is a must for all businesses. There are many benefits of social media marketing including increased exposure, competitive advantage, increased traffic, new leads, increased sales and improved search ranking. But I think the biggest benefit of social media compared to traditional marketing is the ability to communicate with customers and a target audience on a daily basis.

With so many social media platforms available it’s important to be educated about each of them and know which is best for your business as far as reaching your business goals. Here is a list of the most popular networks:

• Facebook – Still the leading social media network
• Twitter
• You Tube – More popular than cable television
• LinkedIn – The largest professional business network
• Google+ – Now the second largest social network
• Pinterest – The fastest growing social network
• Instagram
• StumbleUpon
• Digg

As powerful as social media is, it really is crucial to succeed in today’s business environment. Make sure you take a strategic approach to your social media plan and make sure it works with your other marketing initiatives.