Winning Workplaces

I just posted a poll on LinkedIn. You can go here to vote on it. (You have to be on LinkedIn to do so – you can sign up for free here. Once you do, don't forget to join our group!)

I'm testing a hypothesis: I suspect that most respondents will say that when they catch up on posts for a blog they subscribe to in their feed reader (I use Google Reader), having too many posts to read per day is more annoying than average posts being too long.

Why am I going down this path? It does have a link back to small business and activities for employee engagement, I promise.

I got to thinking the other day, when I was doing a bit of winter cleaning of my blog subscriptions, that blogs with either one very prolific writer (Chris Brogan comes to mind) or many writers (see Small Business Trends) that pump out a lot of content might turn off some otherwise engaged subscribers based solely on the volume of text they need to read each day to stay informed – even if, as is the case with the two above-mentioned blogs, the content is always first rate.

This is one of the reasons I'm the sole blog writer for Winning Workplaces: one person writing two or three posts-worth per day does not equate to an unwieldy burden for our readers. (At least, I hope it doesn't. *wink*)

Now, change blog content to your product/service line, including your marketing efforts, and answer the following questions:

In your (understandable) quest to appeal to as many potential customers as possible, and to cater to the ongoing demands of existing customers, has your product/service line become a burden in its size or complexity?
Have you ever surveyed customers on this? Specifically, have you asked them if ease of understanding of your offerings is a point of difference vs. your competitors?
Turning inward – inside the workplace – in support of a culture of ownership, have you similarly surveyed your employees about their understanding of what you sell?

You might be surprised by the honest feedback you solicit from all stakeholders through these questions – including your own in response to question #1.

As John Jantsch wrote on his Duct Tape Marketing blog last week, the simplest secret to business growth is finding what works and doing more of it. By extension, for your organization this could mean ditching what doesn't work, including products/services that are redundant or not easily understood.