Virtualization: a technique for hiding the physical characteristics of computing resources from the way in which other systems, applications, or end users interact with those resources.

- Wikipedia

Virtualization is a technology term that refers to abstraction. Usually, it’s the abstraction of control mechanisms from the system that those mechanisms control; once they are treated as separate animals, the end user no longer has to know how the mechanism “really” works. Once the user masters the control interface, they have mastered the mechanism - and any other mechanism wedded to that same control interface.

That last part is what makes virtualization such a powerful concept. Around the world today, software companies are busy figuring out new ways of virtualizing your technology experiences. Run any operating system on your computer that you want, all at once. Play your PS3 on your computer, or run your home stereo through your toaster. With virtual machine technology, the lines between your individual devices and techologys blur until, ultimately, they’re essentially all one device.

A myriad of inexpensive, powerful virtual machine technologies are available to you today, many of them offering big advantages to your business. I use several in my day-to-day work and find them indispensible. I think you will as well.

1. vmWare. This nifty program, available for Windows, Mac and Linux, creates a complete electronic Intel-based computer in your current machine’s software space, allowing you to concurrently run any Intel-based operating system and software on a foreign operating system. Run Mac on Linux. Linux on Mac. Either on Windows, and Windows on either. Each operating system hosts excellent software programs not available for the other two - but with vmWare, you can run anything you want without a reboot.

2. WINE. I run Linux on most of my work machines; for me, this program is a godsend. WINE (short for Wine Is Not An Emulator) is a virtualized reimplementation of the Windows 32-bit API on UNIX architectures, allowing many everyday Windows programs to run seamlessly on the much more stable Linux platform. It’s not perfect, but it runs Microsoft Office and Half Life 2 almost flawlessly. Considering the cost (free), you can’t beat that.

3. TightVNC. Sometimes emulators and reimplementations aren’t enough - you need the real thing. But you still want the convenience of running everything on a single desktop. Enter TightVNC. Run the server program on a host machine and the viewer on your desktop of choice; a window simply comes up on your desktop, containing a replica of the host desktop. Take complete control of the host machine remotely, and run an office full of di

Sales and marketing, fundamentally, is about manipulating that context - and so, the reader’s sense of self-importance - in order to motivate them to do something. To effectively market our products and services, we have to cast our prospects’ beliefs and identities into a new frame of reference.

Reframing as a technique comes to us from Dr. Milton H. Erickson, a therapist who spent a significant part of his career working to understand science and therapeutic value of hypnosis. I’ve found Ericksonian reframing to be an invaluable technique in plotting effective marketing strategies. If you’re not sure how to angle your message, you might consider the Six-Step Reframe as a guiding model.

1. Determine what behavior needs to be changed.

Your toughest challenge in selling your message is not your competition, but the status quo. Somehow, your prospects have managed thus far to stay in business without your help (though hopefully not entirely happily). They’ve learned to live with their problem; your job is lead them to see that living with the problem is no longer acceptable. So start by deciding that status quo you need to rock.

2. Determine the communication path between behavior and motive.

Behavior - even self-defeating behavior - does not happen in a vacuum, but follows a communication path from core motivation to outward behavior. The second step in reframing is to determine how the responsible part of the prospect’s psychology is communicating its “desire” consciously to the prospect.

All that is just a complicated way of saying that, most of the time, people generally don’t know why exactly they do what they do - so in the absence of known motivation, the best a therapist can do at this point is to determine how that motivation is turning into behavior. You need to do the same as a marketer. Unfortunately we marketers lack the therapist advantage: we don’t have the luxury of putting our prospects on the couch and asking them a lot of questions.

We have to do two things: extrapolate based on our knowledge of past prospects and customers, and then immediately give your new prospects something to identify with. Too many businesses spend all their message time talking about themselves, when they should be talking about the reader.

Writing strong identity-match copy is a subject all onto itself. Ideally, however, the reader should after a single glance at your copy think to themselves, “Wow - THAT’S me! These people already know me.” If your readers don’t do that, your marketing is falling flat on the second reframe step.

3. Shift the attention from the behavior to the positive intention behind the behavior.

Here we come to the heart of Ericksonian reframing. We presume that every behavior, even a self-destructive one, has its root in a positive intention. The prospect is engaging in the status quo for the same basic reason we all are: because it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Again, since we don’t have direct access to the prospect, we need to extrapolate. Think about it. Your customer is suffering with a situation that costs too much, returns too little, represents a major inconvenience to everyone involved and doesn’t provide a clear competitive advantage. But they’re doing it anyway. So what’s the benefit? What are they getting out of it?

Once you have established a strong identity link, your next step is to convey that the intention is not the behavior. Don’t focus on the status quo - instead, reaffirm the positive benefit behind the status quo.

4. Invite the prospect to creatively embrace an alternative behavioral solution.

Now that we’ve redirected the prospect’s attention from the behavior to the goal, we need to demonstrate that our offering provides a better way to get there. Again, we don’t confront the behavior itself, but the intention - we get across that we’ve got a better angle than the prospect is taking with the current status quo behavior.

5. Offer a compelling vision of better circumstances through the new behavior.

It’s not enough to simply tell the prospect that our way is better. We need to show them. Tell the reader a new story; give them a new sense of future context that safely accomplishes their positive intentions and goals.

Let’s say that the prospect accepts your offer. What does their future look like? What can they mentally, emotionally and physically expect to experience with that new status quo?

6. Successfully reassert a sense of status quo.

This is where a lot of marketing fails: if your proposed new behavior conflicts with the prospect’s other beliefs or motivations, you will introduce cognitive dissonance in your prospect rather than a new behavior. The new behavior must play well with others, or else it will be rejected.

In therapy, this step is known as an ecological check. The therapist rounds out the reframe by attempting to elicit objections to the new behavior. Why might the prospect not accept the new behavior as a superior means of reaching the same positive goals?

In marketing, this is where we acknowledge that the reader is not a demographic, but a unique one-of-a-kind case. Your solution is perfectly suited for them. Specifically. Assume that the new behavior is going to cause a conflict - and that the conflict is only apparent because the reader doesn’t yet know the whole story.

Since (again) we don’t have direct access to the prospect at this time, it’s now time to invite direct access. We end the reframe by reinforcing awareness of the basic problem and the communication paths from step #2. Dramatically bring the problem full circle and then invite the reader to contact you for more information.

Once you have direct access (phone or meeting) with the prospect, you can go back through the reframing steps again. As effective as the model can be in writing, it is much more effective in person.

Reframing is just one of many psychological models that come in handy when you’re trying to promote your business. So next time you’re in the bookstore, don’t stop your browsing with just the business section.. gold nuggets can be found everywhere!

In my line of work as a B2B copywriter, nothing is more important than knowing how to identify with a client’s specific audience. Are they predominantly male or female? Young or mature? The boss or a spear-carrier? What do they worry about? What don’t they care about? Before we even begin crafting your business message, we need to lock this down: who exactly is this going to impress - and why?

Now wait, I say - don’t answer that one so quickly.

Traditionally, this mythic someone is called the decision maker. Almost every book on sales strategy obsesses over this person. Most businesses working in the B2B sphere focus nearly all their efforts to reach this person - often, far too much - operating on the assumption that once we’ve impressed the decision maker with our stellar sales pitch, the deal is as good as closed.

If only it were that easy in real life! If you want to succeed in selling your product or service to a business willing to pay for it, the path there gets considerably more complicated.

Why is that?

No decision maker works in a vacuum. Everyone, from the janitor to the CEO, is accountable to someone. Decisions have to be justified, usually by someone who gets your message second- or third-hand. Your marketing message must have the legs to communicate well beyond immediate impressions, because the final decision is almost never made on immediate impressions. There isn’t just one mind to win: there’s a whole chain of them.

Emotion ultimately doesn’t sell B2B. If you think otherwise, you’re confusing B2B with B2C; the people you’re dealing with here have greater responsibilities that require more careful contemplation. Be prepared to take the time to explain why and how your offering represents a solid business decision.

The fatal flaw of pushing for an impulse purchase from a business decision maker - there is always someone else in the chain of decision who will look at your advertisement with a dispassionate and skeptical eye. If you’re fishing for a decision, you must always remember that your goal is not to appeal to an individual.. it is to convince a collective thought process. You must anticipate the questions that will be asked by people you will never meet.

Credibility is every day. Successful businesses aren’t on the lookout for good deals, but good relationships. They don’t want to be constantly shopping around; if they know that you can be trusted to deliver reliably, it may be a very long while before they even consider switching to one of your competitors.

That means that every communication you offer to a customer, from website and brochure copy to your voice mail answering recording, must convey and maintain a consistently professional tone and message. Every contact that you have with your customer is another opportunity to solidify your credibility - and to win them all over again.

In the end, business decision makers - at every link in the chain - are just like you and me. They’re busy. They worry about the risks of doing business. They don’t want to talk to you directly. And they want to survive to grow and succeed another day. They’d rather vet you first before letting you in the door. And then they’d rather not have to hunt around to find a replacement for you.

If you can face that challenge, you’re ready to face your B2B audience - and close more deals.

As crazy as it sounds, I’ve actually had client conference calls like this.

This nails it about as well as I’ve ever seen.

The buzz word in today’s business world is MARKETING. However, most people often ask for a simple explanation of “Marketing.” Here it is:

You’re a woman and you see a handsome guy at a party. You go up to him and say, “I’m fantastic in bed.”

That’s Direct Marketing.

You’re at a party with a bunch of friends and see a handsome guy. One of your friends goes up to him and pointing at you says, “She’s fantastic in bed.”

That’s Advertising.

You see a handsome guy at a party. You go up to him and get his telephone number. The next day you call and say,”Hi, I’m fantastic in bed.”

That’s Telemarketing.

You’re at a party and see a handsome guy. You get up and straighten your dress. You walk up to him and pour him a drink. You say,”May I,” and reach up to straighten his tie brushing your breast lightly against his arm, and then say, “By the way, I’m fantastic in bed.”

That’s Public Relations.

You’re at a party and see a handsome guy. He walks up to you and says, “I hear you’re fantastic in bed.”

That’s Brand Recognition.

You’re at a party and see a handsome guy. You talk him into going home with your friend.

That’s a Sales Rep.

Your friend can’t satisfy him so he calls you.

That’s Tech Support.

You’re on your way to a party when you realize that there could be handsome men in all these houses you’re passing. So you climb onto the roof of one situated toward the center and shout at the top of your lungs, “I’m fantastic in bed!”

That’s Junk Mail.

Any questions?

If you haven’t made any, consider these:

1. Find more and better allies. The fatal flaw of many small businesses is the owner’s psychological need for autonomy. The success of your business directly depends on the quality of your partners, friends, associates and long term customers. Work harder to win and keep better ones.

2. Learn better methods for tracking ROM (Return On Message). Is your marketing directly translating into revenue? Do you know, or are you working from assumption? Resolve this year to read more books on marketing statistics and to learn more about how to scientifically determine the success and failure rates of your marketing efforts.

3. Become more diligent at maintaining your contact list. If you’re not systematically tracking who you talk to during the year, you’re effectively starting your business over from scratch every time the sun comes up. Get a good contact database like ACT! and keep records of every phone call, letter mailing, prospect and sale. Once a name is in your database, resolve to stay in regular contact with that person for at least the next couple of years. (Book recommendation: The Referral Of A Lifetime, by Tim Templeton.)

4. Know thyself: contract, expand and contract again. A healthy business is not one in a constant growth phase, but one that steadily grows, contracts, and then grows again - each cycle forcing the business to eliminate waste and concentrate more fully on the most important aspects of its market and resources. Make that cycle your friend this year. (Book recommendation: The 80/20 Principle, by Richard Koch.)

5. Exploit technology to the fullest. Are you wringing every last ounce of power and usefulness out of your technology budget? Probably not. Resolve this year to improve your technology skills and to make the absolute best uses of your computers, USB sticks, Internet access, cell phones and other digital toys. A twenty-dollar investment in the right hands can easily transform into a healthy revenue boost as the year rolls on.

Happy New Year, everyone. Take 2008 by storm!

Whether you’re on the client or provider side, it’s always in everyone’s best interest to keep the project on time and on target. Not sure where to begin? Start with these basic ground rules.

Ruthlessly leverage technology. Cheap, powerful consumer electronics have never been more prevalent in modern society than today. Exploit it to your best organizational advantage. Stay organized; maintain a solid documentation trail with email, Internet fax, USB sticks, and any other affordable gadget that keeps the forces of chaos at bay. Tech is your best friend.

Keep contact channels simple and ironclad. The fastest way to drive a project into cost and time overruns is to add more decision makers to the team. Instead, designate responsibilities and keep it that way. All my own contracts insist on my reporting to a single point of contact who manages final editorial decisions - having simple, direct and persistent communication channels keeps everything smooth and simple.

Establish realistic milestones and stick to them. The time to change your mind on construction is during the blueprint phase, not once half the house is built. Don’t reinvent the spec mid-project. Make all the real decisions early on - endlessly chasing a moving target is no way to manage a marketing project.

Factor in delays and real life issues. Life happens. People have emergency surgery. People get married. People move offices. Be prepared for the delays that real life can create, and adapt to circumstance.

And finally, but most importantly:

Know where you’re going from the start.

Before any hours get incurred or any work gets done, sit with your team and plan out exactly - in concrete, non-abstract details - what the end goal will be. What are you trying to achieve? Make it specific and achievable: don’t plan to make money, or to jump to number one in Google. Instead plan the project itself and know exactly how you will know whether or not the project has succeeded. As the saying goes: if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.

So how about you? What tips do you have for keeping a marketing project firmly on the rails?

It was embarrassing. I tried damned near everything.. except, of course, the stuff that would work, the stuff that cost money. I hit up friends and family for leads. I cold called. I sent out a blizzard of emails. I joined up with all the online leads groups, wrote ezine articles, did all the other cheesy nonsense that wastes time and doesn’t produce much of a return. Eventually, I hit on a combination of direct mail and SEO that worked for me - but even then, getting work was a hit or miss proposition: no one ever seemed to be in a buying mood, and I always seemed to be a day ahead or a day behind the purchase.

That’s when I began to listen, not just to my prospects’ needs, but to rumors.

Rumors are powerful things for their subtlety. All human literature, dating back to the start of history, had its roots in gossip - stories, life lessons, sharp asides, loose talk. And when you’re out marketing your services, you don’t have the luxury of ignoring them. They provide intelligence on the ground, illuminating future decisions and mapping out how you should be approaching your markets. And they are everywhere.

Some of the valuable rumors I’ve heard over the last year or so:

1. A web design associate was planning to take a social business trip with a mutual client - a very good one. He mentioned it just in passing conversation, but it gave me the opportunity to discuss the client’s copywriting needs for the coming year - needs he later discussed with the client during the trip, ultimately turning into work for both of us.

2. A client specializing in corporate BP (business process) consulting hired me to ghostwrite a white paper, a project that included interviews with several subject matter experts in the field. One expert happened to mention offhandedly that, due to mass mergers and general market instability, companies in a particular (and highly lucrative) technical niche marketing segment - one that I’d never seriously considered before - tended to be badly disorganized internal wrecks.

Such companies tend to outsource a lot in my experience; after a few discreet inquiries in that particularly industry, I determined that those companies did indeed tend to be heavy outsourcers. That gave me a huge new - and relatively untapped - market segment to pitch my services to.

3. A corporate PR firm hired me to attend a local trade show. I was to interview the executive officers of a industrial firm that made nanoparticulate ceramic materials for the aerospace industry; I’d be writing an article about the firm’s coming partnership with a major European chemical company. After the interview, I made the rounds, chatting with sales reps and service engineers of a couple dozen material manufacturing firms. In only a few hours, I collected a wealth of industry intelligence that proved very useful later.

Opportunities are everywhere, but rarely do the good ones come banging on your door - and rarely can you go out and find them. You have to sneak up on them.

To get the good ones, you have to be a good listener, appreciating rumor whenever you can get it - and refining your ability to process and retain it. The smallest asides can easily develop into the best clients.. and the most lucrative jobs.

Here are some of Rob’s recommendations for happily doing digital business.

Computers. Here in the office, my preferred workstation is a dual-monitor Pentium 4 3.06 running Fedora Core Linux; I use OpenOffice as my office suite. Most of the heavy lifting (email management, long term file storage, backup management, etc.) is handled by a P-III office server, running Red Hat 9.0.

The Website. I’ve hosted with Westhost now for years, even before I was operating under the RSWarren.com domain name (registered through DomainDiscover). Having your own domain name is vital these days, but just as important is a solid and affordable hosting provider. Westhost has been everything a guy could ever want: professional, secure, loaded with features, techie-friendly, 24/7 support, lots of toys for low prices. They’re by far the best host provider I’ve ever worked with.

Email. Also Westhost. It’s amazing to me that I’m still getting service inquiries - or, God help us, cold calls - from folks using the email addresses they got free with their home cable internet service. There’s no reason for that these days; if you’re still sending business email with your Comcast or Adelphia (or even AOL) address, do yourself a big favor and plunk down the pennies for your own domain. Keep the name short (preferably less than nine characters, not including the .com suffix, and do make sure it’s a .com domain) and memorable, and expect to hold that domain for five years or more.

Spam management is also a major concern for a lot of us, and I’ve never really found a good off-the-shelf solution to the problem.. so I wrote one myself. It sorts the hundreds of emails I receive daily into a series of folders, filtering out about 95% of the spam and virus emails I receive using a whitelist protocol. All this is done on the server, which is running 24/7. Email is archived regularly to CD-ROM.

Note: An email sig is a terrible thing to waste. Make sure to use your email signature to include your contact information with every email you send out; you never know when that’ll come in handy.

Internet Fax and My Good Friend, PDF. A lot of my professional life simplified the day I finally caved and began using an Internet fax service. Gone are the days of rolled paper snags, faded toner, missing pages - now I have a directory of contract and document templates on the server, ready to update and print off into an Adobe PDF file. Then it’s just a matter of logging into my eFax account and sending it on its way.

Receiving is even easier: I have a dedicated fax number, and anything sent to that number is emailed to me as a perfect .TIF graphic image, which gets stored on the server for safekeeping. When I get a few spare moments, I convert the raw images to PDF.

Adobe did the digital world a gigantic favor by creating the PDF document format. Nearly anything that can be done in print can be done virtually in PDF, opening countless doors to using professional graphic design without loading yourself down with a lot of paper and printing costs. It also makes contract management a snap for the small business owner.

Web Browser. Mozilla Firefox, hands down, no contest, close the door and go home. Honestly, though, you’re in good shape with almost anything except Microsoft Internet Explorer.

I run much of my business with the help of a custom-written web application that handles my bookkeeping, client and project management. It’s a great tool, but I’d go insane if I had to sit watching IE stumble through it every day.

I can’t even begin to describe how much I loathe Internet Explorer. It hasn’t seen a serious new release in almost five years, has no idea how CSS works, renders fonts as though they were drawn in crayon, and has a chronic habit of letting the world rape your hard drive. If you’re currently on IE yourself, throw down your shackles of oppression and join us in web surfing utopia: download and install Firefox today.

Speaker Phone. Boy, did it take a while to work this one out. I spend a lot of time at the keyboard, and when I’m on the phone with a client, I need my hands free to type. To do my job, I need either a headset phone or a good speakerphone - and there simply aren’t many of them out there.

I have a lot of electronics going in the office, which means potentially a lot of RF interference for a phone not designed to handle it. That alone kills most of the household handsfrees; I went through four different models before a client recommended the Radio Shack TAD-3871. Radio Shack? You’ve got to be kidding, I said. Nope, he swore, the best phone around for the price.

And damned if the man wasn’t right. Minimal interference, good speaker pickup, nice volume control, good broadcast range, simple design. I bought a Plantronics headset at the same time - I was a headset junkie then - but I’ve barely used it. Consigned to the desk drawer, it’s been a casualty of my speakerphone conversion.

Good Phone Service. The best desk phone does you no good if your service itself is lousy. I live in a part of the country where I really have only two choices - a conventional land line from my phone company, or a digital phone through my internet provider. While the internet phone is cheaper, I’ve heard enough inside stuff to question whether the technology really has matured enough to be reliable for a small business. For the time being, I’m happy to pay a bit more for a conventional line. Also, I live in Hurricane Alley; when we got clocked by four major storms in the fall of 2004, we lost power for days but the land lines never faltered. That’s good enough for me.

Also, shell out the extra bucks and get the full feature spread. Voice mail is obvious, but call forwarding can be a lifesaver. If I need to be out of the office for a while during the day, a few keypresses sends all incoming calls to my cell phone. Be sure to get unlimited long distance - it’s just silly these days to quibble over domestic LD charges, especially when a client is involved.

Cell Phone. Nokia 6010, service provided by T-Mobile. Cell phone tech is one area where I’m not impressed by lots of cool toys. Digital camera? Games? Web browser? No, thanks: just give me a simple, sturdy workhorse. Nokia is certainly that.

Digital Recorder. When I’m doing interviews, either with clients or subject matter experts, I don’t want to spend a lot of time asking questions that they’ve already answered. I much prefer to let the interview flow naturally and let the subject talk, undistracted by my massive note scribbling and pleas to wait while I write something down. Also, many interviews are one-time events - I don’t have the luxury of going back later to reinterview.

Enter the Sony ICD-P210.

I love this little doodad. Small and lightweight, powered by two AAA’s, I can set to record and put it down on the conference table or near the speakerphone and then relax. (Of course, I only record with subject permission.) Nearly 16 hours of recording time, saved to an internal flash chip. Afterwards, I download the file via USB to a .WAV file, which I then convert to MP3 for storage. Wonderful for making sure that nothing in a rare interview gets lost to bad memory.

Digital Camera. I’m not a photographer, but from time to time I’ll be asked by a client or editor to show up on assignment ready to snap a photo or three. For consumer magazine work, it’s nearly a prerequisite.

Again, Sony comes to the rescue. A slight bit outdated now, my little Sony Cybershot DSC-P100 is a handy little gizmo, producing professional-quality images at 5.1MP. When I’m in the field, my go pack usually consists of the Cybershot, a tripod and some spare bits for the camera, the P210 and some paper and pens. Like the P210, images from the camera are downloadable via USB for long term storage.

and finally..

The Manual Typewriter.

Yes, I own and use a manual typewriter - an Olympia Traveller C, bought new in early 2002. Sadly, it seems to have ceased production in 2004, though apparently Olivetti is still making manuals.

A word processor is a wonderful editing tool, but I’m here to tell you, it makes composition so much harder, especially if you’re working with thin air. A writer never knows while drafting whether what he’s writing is any good; like wine, writing needs to age a bit before a quality judgment can really be made. With a word processor, it’s just too easy to delete drafts in a fit of frustration. Also, as Harlan Ellison (who writes on a manual) has pointed out on more than one occasion, a hard drive crash won’t destroy his stories: once written, they’re written.

When nothing else works, I break out the manual typewriter. That always works - sort of the difference between going into combat with a 9mm pistol, and doing so with a solid assault rifle. When you absolutely, positively have to crank solid copy on deadline, accept no substitutes.