WordPress 3.2.1 upgrade fix for PHP version

Just wanted to give quick kudos to my web hosting company, Blue Gravity Communications, for their quick response to my recent mini-heart-attack while trying to upgrade to WordPress 3.2.1.

Common problem, apparently – when you try to run the upgrade, you get a server error stating that your server is running an older version of PHP. Here’s the exact error I received:

Your server is running PHP version 4.4.9 but WordPress 3.2.1 requires at least 5.2.4.

In researching this wording, I learned that possibly editing the .htaccess file might be the fix. But, the exact line of code to place into the .htaccess file seemed to be different for every web host.

So I fired off an email to Blue Gravity, with whom I’ve hosted websites for almost 10 years (most of them on WordPress), not expecting to hear anything since it was, after all, Sunday morning.

Lo and behold, the pro’s at Blue Gravity not only got back to me within 20 minutes, they also steered me to my hosting account dashboard, where I was able to click through a few easy steps to force my websites to run on the needed version of PHP.

So – for anyone else who runs into this error and uses Blue Gravity as their webhost, here are the steps to fix:

1. Go to www.bluegravityhosting.com, click on “Account Manager,” and log in to your hosting account.
2. Scroll down to the “Website Settings” tab, then click “PHP Settings.” You should then see a list of your sites.
3. Click the word “Settings” to the right of the website you wish to update, then scroll down a bit to the “Update PHP Settings” area.
4. From the “PHP Version” drop-down, just select the version you want to run. I picked 5.2.* . Then click the “Update” button to save your change.
5. Repeat for other sites you wish to update.

That’s it! Less than two minutes to fix what I thought was going to be a booger of an issue!

And by the way, if you aren’t using the WordPress Automatic Upgrade (WPAU) plug-in to upgrade your WP version, you should be! This awesome little plug-in has been working flawlessly for me for several years.

Nurturing the natural entrepreneurial spirit

This post originally appeared on an older blog, MarketingIdeaBlog.com. I am re-publishing it here because I believe the information is not only still valuable, but because it can help readers better understand my approach to business communication.

When I was 40, I learned to ride a motorcycle. It wasn’t difficult to learn, but there did come a point where I hit a roadblock. I was doing something wrong which caused me – twice – to drop the bike at slow speed, when pulling away from a stop sign. It totally blew my confidence, even though I was a licensed rider. It took me months of talking about the problem and reading and getting encouragement from other women riders online – all of this while not riding at all – to finally figure out the problem.

And then, the time came to get back on the bike. My husband rode my bike for me to the high school parking lot and my daughter tagged along. I found myself sitting on the bike with the shifter in neutral, exhaust rumbling, and tears running down my face. Scared that I was going to drop my beautiful bike again, and fail at something I really wanted to do. My self-talk went something like this:

“Self, you can either do this, or not. It’s up to you. But you have to decide. If you’re not going to do it, you have to sell the bike. And you know what? You CAN do it. You’ve already done it. You have a license that proves you know how to do it. You just have to drop that shifter into first and roll forward. Just go.”

As I sat there, I happened to look over at my daughter, sitting on the curb and poking a stick around in the dirt. Perfectly happy to spend her Saturday watching me go in circles in a parking lot. And I thought, “If I give up just because this is really hard, what does she learn?”

My desire to set a good example, to be a lesson in perserverence in the face of uncertainty, won out. I pulled in the clutch, dropped into first gear, and rolled forward. After an hour-long practice session in the parking lot, including plenty of turns from a stop, I hit the streets – newly confident and ready to ride. And I haven’t dropped the bike since. Well, at least not for the same reason.

I share this story because being an entrepreneur is a little like learning to ride a motorcycle at age 40. You understand the risk, and take it anyway. You realize that we don’t just persevere for ourselves, but also for the example it sets for others – including our kids.

Have you noticed that kids seem to be born with the entrepreneurial spirit? With the desire to be self-sufficient? It manifests itself in lemonade stands, lawn-mowing gigs and babysitting jobs. But somewhere along the way, that spirit gets – if not crushed, certainly back-seated to the notion of working for someone else. That a job is stability, and that owning a business is crazy-talk.

As a business owner, you have a unique opportunity to nurture your kids’ natural sense of entrepreneurship. To show them that their talents and interests hold at least as much potential as that job at McDonald’s. As summer approaches, what will you do to teach at home what’s not being taught at school: that entrepreneurialism is at least as rewarding as building a career with an employer – and in many ways, moreso? That risk – especially calculated risk – is good? That sometimes, you just have to take that leap of faith and roll forward?

Bad Twitter advice from Advertising Age

It’s disappointing that David Berkowitz (representing the venerable Advertising Age – i.e., someone who should know better) would tell you, in one breath, that the single most important thing you can do when jumping into Social Media for business is to “establish your goals,” and then in the next breath tell you that the one person you should follow on Twitter  is Shaquille O’Neal.

Now Shaq may indeed be a Twitter super-user, and he might even coin more words than Seth Godin. But recommending him as your one must-follow was a waste of an opportunity to give real, sound advice.

The person you should follow on Twitter, if you’re a business owner and really only have time to follow one, is the person in your industry who has taken the time to become a resource for others. This person:

• Posts a ton of links to relevant reading material
• Re-tweets useful stuff – not fluff
• Engages with those who reply to them
• Follows proportionally to their followers
• Blogs passionately about the industry and links out when appropriate to their own incredible blog

Having established that setting goals is “the most important thing” you can do when getting into social media, I’d say that the second most important thing you should do is make sure you’re not wasting your time by connecting with people who can’t help you meet them.

How you fire someone can impact your brand

Have you ever been fired? Or had to fire someone? Let me tell you, it sucks. It sucks regardless of which side of the desk you’re on. I’ve had three experiences with being fired, and they all sucked.

The first time, the entire staff of a small ad agency was called into the conference room and the President read a statement which began, “We are forced to cut our staffing by half. The following seven people are fired…” I survived that one, but took on the duties of two other people in addition to my own work.

The second time, my job was eliminated and my employer offered me a clerical position that came with a 30 percent pay cut. I took the “consolation job” and hung in there for a year.

The third time, my position was eliminated in a re-organization effort and I was escorted to the door by a security guard, told to make an appointment to come back and get my personal belongings, and given a small severance package.

When making a decision to leave a company, employees are always counseled not to “burn bridges.” Sure it would be satisfying to holler “Take this job and shove it!” on the way out the door, but that rarely bodes well when you need a reference in the future.

Well I think the same goes for the business owner or manager: when you are forced to let someone go, don’t burn the bridge with undignified or insensitive methods. You are the leader, after all, and leadership isn’t always easy.

If you treat people decently – which you will do if you take even five minutes to think about and understand the impact your decision is having on their lives – they may just continue to sing your praises even after they’re gone. Treat them like crap, and you may find that while customers speak highly of you, past employees denegrate you repeatedly in their daily conversations. And that sort of “word of mouth” gets around just as quickly as the kind spread by customers. Maybe faster, given the “small world” nature of peoples’ personal and professional networks.

Being a “good company” is not just about good customer service – it’s about good and fair treatment of those who commit to you their time and talents. In short, how you fire someone impacts your brand and you should take the time and trouble to make sure you have a process that meets your needs as an employer but that’s fair and dignified.

Am I right for the job?

The cooler temperatures, the bright blue skies, and the early-falling leaves this week tell me that Autumn is in the air. Another sure sign: I’m craving apple crisp. And not just any apple crisp, but “quick apple crisp” from my Pampered Chef cookbook. In fact it would be closer to the truth to admit that I don’t just crave Quick Apple Crisp in the Fall – I actually crave the whole Pampered Chef experience.

The Pampered Chef is a direct-sales company founded in 1980 by Doris Christopher, who at that time was a stay-at-home-mom and former home economics teacher. Doris sold the company for a bajillion dollars in 2000 to investor Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway. She currently serves the company as Chairman. Pampered Chef products are sold by individual consultants via the in-home party method, and consultants earn money not only by selling products but also by recruiting, training and guiding new consultants to their own successes.

In the late 1990’s and again in the early 2000’s, I was a Pampered Chef consultant. I thoroughly enjoyed almost every aspect of working for this company. I loved the story behind the founding of the company. I loved the principles upon which the company was built. I loved setting up “kitchen shows” in my friends’ homes and showing them how easy it was to prepare simple and delicious recipes for their families. I loved using the products. I loved going to training meetings. I didn’t even mind doing the paperwork for each show once it all was computerized and I didn’t have to do manual math to tally my orders.

If I could have gotten over my one stumbling block, I would have loved to become a Director for this company, recruiting and training new consultants and coaching them in the marketing of their own businesses.

But there was one aspect of the job I didn’t like: I found it very difficult to convince people to be “kitchen show” hostesses. My first six shows – the six I needed to complete my “new consultant commitment” – were hosted by personal friends and family members. Each of them invited people from their own personal and professional networks to attend a show, and what should have happened was that a few of the people at each show should have volunteered to host a show in their home, with me as their consultant. The problem was that often, no one wanted to host a show. And I was extremely uncomfortable pressuring them into doing so.

As any Pampered Chef (or any other direct sales) consultant will tell you, a consultant without hostesses is pretty much dead in the water.

Let me be clear: I don’t blame The Pampered Chef for this shortfall. It was a classic case of not having the right personality for a key part of the job.

So here’s my challenge for you this week, coming as it does from personal experience: take a good look at the parts of your job or your business that you aren’t well suited for (c’mon, you know there’s one or two), and consider how you might ask for help in overcoming those weaknesses. And then, invest in yourself the time and money it will take to solve the problem. Or, consider whether it’s time to bring someone else into the business who can fill that role for you.

Special thanks to Action Print!

Would like to take a moment to thank my good friend Dan Hansen at Action Print, an awesome local commercial offset and digital printer who donated production of my new networking cards! I’ll be using these not only to directly network with folks who might be seeking a marketing director for their own company, but also for those who might be able to refer me to interested colleagues.

The cards direct people to this website, and on the back they contain my contact information and ‘elevator pitch.’ The pitch says, “A creative, strategic, internet-savvy marketing professional and multi-tasker with strong communication skills, seeking to lead a dynamic company, association or non-profit organization in effective use of internal and external communication tools.”

Thanks, Dan, for making this investment in a friend’s career!

Getting distracted and getting back on track

This post originally appeared on an older blog, MarketingIdeaBlog.com. I am re-publishing it here because I believe the information is not only still valuable, but because it can help readers better understand my approach to business communication.

One of my personal obsessions is genealogy – the study and discovery of my family tree. I began my journey in the spring of 1997, just a few months after my mother had passed away unexpectedly. For me, genealogy is the perfect blend of research and outdoor exploration: rooting out the names and dates of critical life events for my ancestors, connecting with far-flung cousins (some of whom possessed precious antique family photographs!), pouring over brittle old documents in the basements of historic county courthouses, wandering through cemeteries large and small in search of a stone with a familiar name.

I learned one of the core lessons of genealogy very early on – and I think it’s a lesson that also applies to small business marketing: put simply, it’s easy to get distracted. In a moment, you can wander off the main path (looking for direct blood-line ancestors) and start down any number of secondary trails that lead to aunts, uncles, cousins, skeletons-in-closet, or even just historical context.

For small business owners, the main marketing path should always lead to the retention of existing customers and the attraction of new customers. Things like learning how to use a page layout program, or writing better copy, or understanding the psychology of consumer purchasing, are really secondary trails.

Granted, they’re inviting trails – made moreso by books and tools that promise to make it easy, to deliver “professional marketing materials from your desktop with one click,” to present you with that golden nugget that will open a floodgate to success. But probably the biggest challenge facing small business owners is figuring out how far to wander down one of those secondary trails, and when to step back onto the main path where actual progress is made.

In genealogy, I step back onto the main trail by keeping a list of the current questions that will lead me to someone’s parents, because “new parents” mean another branch has been added to the tree.

In business, your marketing treatment (or marketing plan, if you’ve gone that far) should be the primary path. It gives you direction, it reminds you what the goals are, and it gives you a point to which you can always return if you veer off course. What tools do you use to guide yourself back to the main path when you fear you’ve spent too much time on a secondary trail? What secondary trails have been most valuable to you? Which ones do you wish you hadn’t wasted time pursuing?

Photo from the Flickr stream of tonyaustin.

Lessons from lost opportunity

This post originally appeared on an older blog, MarketingIdeaBlog.com. I am re-publishing it here because I believe the information is not only still valuable, but because it can help readers better understand my approach to business communication.

In 1996, I launched the website for my creative services company, then called The Ad Shop Plus. It was my “showpiece” web development effort, bringing together my very best (at the time) strategic, creative, planning and design skills.

One day I was browsing through an issue of Home Office Computing magazine, and saw that they were seeking nominations for a column called “Sites We Like” in which they would offer up the websites of small and home-based businesses as examples of good web strategy. I submitted my site for consideration and went about my life.

Over the next few months I decided that my business name was too limiting (possibly even hokey) and did not accurately reflect my range of professional services. I prepared to change the name to Green & Company Creative Services. I had a name-change plan, a budget and a timeline in place, and a new website all ready to launch, when I got the call from HOC. That’s right, I was one month away from changing my name (from redefining my business!) and they wanted to feature my old identity.

My options were to decline the feature, since my company info would be completely different by the time the magazine hit the stands and re-submit the new site for future consideration; or, to hold off my name change until after the article had run and reap the rewards of free publicity in a major magazine that targeted my small business clientele.

I chose the former. I thanked the reporter profusely for her interest and told her I would let her know when my new site launched. I followed up a few weeks later with a personal note to her, giving her the new URL, but I never heard another word.

I realized pretty quickly what I had sacrificed: An opportunity to establish credibility in web development on a national scale, in front of an audience I truly needed to reach, for the chance to shed my old identity a few months sooner. I now believe that this was a major mistake. It certainly took the joy out of using that cool new letterhead I’d designed.

I tell this story because good lessons sometimes come from our less-than-stellar moments, and because it illustrates why agility is so important. I was small enough to be nimble – to veer off the name-change course just long enough to grab a HUGE fistful of credible publicity – but I was blinded by the notion of sticking to my plan. And in so doing, lost a golden opportunity to grow my business.

Your business is a Jack Russell Terrier

This post originally appeared on an older blog, MarketingIdeaBlog.com. I am re-publishing it here because I believe the information is not only still valuable, but because it can help readers better understand my approach to business communication.

Have you ever watched canine agility trials? Your business should be just like that – fast, nimble, always moving forward. Maybe even a beef-flavored biscuit for you at the finish.

So what’s holding you back? Probably some well-meaning people, whose advice you’ve sought because they are Experts in Their Field. They’re telling you that you have to have a plan before you can do any marketing. And since marketing plans are based on time-consuming research, you haven’t gotten around to doing any. And so you don’t have a plan, so you aren’t doing any marketing.

Well here’s a news flash: You don’t have to have a full-blown plan to do your marketing. If you can define some basic elements, you can establish a lean, simple document that allows plenty of flexibility while still serving to keep you on track. In video production, we called this basic document a treatment, and it was used to make sure everyone understood the parameters of a given project. As applied to your marketing, your treatment should include information about:

* Your audience
* Your brand
* Your creative strategy
* Your budget

With your treatment in place, you can consider yourself free of the shackles of the formal marketing plan. You’re suddenly fast, nimble, and moving forward. You’re on a marketing agility course. You’re the Jack Russell Terrier of marketing!

Now – what’s a marketing idea you’ve wanted to try, but refrained because you didn’t have a plan?

Photo at caninecoalition.com.

What Hitchcock means to your branding

This post originally appeared on an older blog, MarketingIdeaBlog.com. I am re-publishing it here because I believe the information is not only still valuable, but because it can help readers better understand my approach to business communication.

When I was in college, I took a series of English classes where we learned to study symbolism in novels and film. The idea was to look for a particular recurring object within the work, and then use the instances of that object to extrapolate some higher meaning beyond just the obvious storyline. So, for example, we could argue that Alfred Hitchcock’s use of containers (baskets, trunks, overnight bags, apartments, etc.) in the film “Rear Window” symbolized various states of confinement and/or freedom. The movie, therefore, wasn’t just about what happened when Jimmy Stewart spied on his neighbors. It was about confinement, containment and freedom.

What’s critical about this type of exercise is that the final answer to the question, “What is the film about?” could be different for each person. Because each person brings to bear their own set of experiences with and understanding of containers.

The same concept holds true for your business’s brand. Your brand is not your logo, or even your logo plus your tagline. Even though you worked really hard to perfect those things, they are not your brand. Your brand, in fact, isn’t anything you can see or touch. It isn’t anything that you, per se, tell your customers.

Your brand is the sum total of your customer’s experience with your business. It’s the impression they have formed over time about your worth and value. It’s what the logo means to them when they see it.

If you aren’t consistent in delivering the experience you want your customers to have, they will each have their own interpretation of what your business is about. And you won’t have a brand.

Of course, it’s equally dangerous to deliver a consistently poor experience to your customers. Because then you will have a brand, but it won’t be the one you want.

Look beyond your logo. What is the brand you want to build around your business? How consistent are you in delivering the experiences that will allow your customers to arrive at this interpretation? What’s holding you back from being more consistent?

Photo from whirligig-tv.co.uk.

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