Darwin-based designer and clothing retailer, Jo from Viva La Body, says it saddens her seeing women and girls emerging from fitting rooms upset, disappointed and embarrassed by their body shape.

Jo was speaking Saturday morning in Darwin at the Skin Deep Project’s high tea to mark International No Diet Day.

Her message to women (and men) is to flip their thinking when shopping for clothes.

Don’t lament that you don’t fit the clothes you tried on, instead, simply note that the particular garment you tried on was not made to fit your body, she said.

In testament to the ability of social media to bring people together around issues in the Northern Territory, this fledgling group attracted a gathering of about 40 people out the back of the small shop on a long weekend Saturday morning.

We are different but united through social media

Rachael Bettiens (pictured with Steve Davis), one of the founders of the Skin Deep Project, observed that attendees had bodies of all different shapes and sizes.

She said it is dangerous of us to use mass produced fashion sizing as the benchmark for what is ‘normal’, torturing ourselves for not having bodies that met these artificial standards.

The day attracted a solid turnout thanks to the project’s use of social media, something which Rachael is planning to enhance through the Darwin Digital Enterprise Program.

Furthermore, co-founder and coordinator, Lauren Moss, highlighted one of the ways that digital tools are helping to spread the message of empowerment and healthy self esteem in the Top End.

She shared that local woman, Rachael Warland, had been so inspired by the Skin Deep Project’s messages she built up the courage to turn to YouTube to reveal publicly her wish to sing, something she’d felt to inhibited to share with anyone previously, including her husband.

From my perspective, this story gives us a taste of how digital tools can help individuals connect with others for support and encouragement.

And you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand that a Top End brimful with people who are happier within themselves will ultimately lead to an economic bounty!

My 4yo daughter’s impression of the internet crook after I’d told her the story

The internet is a profound human invention. It is also a portal to the dark side of human nature.

This was brought home to me with a contact of mine from the Top End had his email address hacked last week.

As a result, I got a fake sob story from ‘him’ about being stranded in Manila and needing some emergency money.

Would you have fallen for it?

Head on over to read the full story AND the fun way I did my best to hook the internet scammer into a trap with Filipino police.

The article is: I’m writing this with tears in my eyes: The day I almost trapped an internet scam artist

As she started talking about some of the experiences she gives her clients on tours in outback Australia, my jaw dropped because what she shared was exactly in line with what I was planning to blog about on my Baker Marketing Blog this week.

So, at the risk of repeating myself, I thought I was share a link to this weeks Baker Marketing blog here on The RITE Series.

The article in question is entitled, It’s elementary: The Sherlock Holmes approach to marketing your business.

What Tess was sharing with me was the moment when she stops her clients and points out the rich bounty of food they have just been trampling through, unaware.

So, too, the Sherlock Holmes mindset is one of trained awareness of how to view the world with a certain end in mind.

The point of the article I am sharing is that this gives us an insight into the essence of content we can create for our businesses.

I hope you find it helpful.

I had that experience in the past week when I stumbled across an interview with Google co-founder, Larry Page, on Wired.

The main thing that caught my attention was the passionate response he made when it was suggested that Google was a little foolish trying to compete in the social networking sector where Facebook is such a giant.

He thought the suggestion was outrageous, yes, outrageous!

And so he should.

Too often I see or meet with small to medium business owners who are dispirited that there efforts chipping away in a market dominated by more entrenched competitors seem to be failing.

In part, their measurements or expectations are overly optimistic, but usually it is because they are trying to compete on the same terms instead of moving the goal posts and offering a different twist to their market.

Have a read and see what you think: How ‘outrageously’ confident are you about your business’ place in the market?

It even includes a reference to Darwin-based academic, Dr Iain Waller.

Despite the fact that the criticism was legitimate, I still empathised with ‘my’ NT News.

I think this is because I spend a sizeable portion of my life in the Top End every year, and have done for a number of years now.

It also made me wonder whether Territorians share a stronger tribal bond than people ‘down South’?

As you market your business or organisation, it might be valuable to think about that question.

If it is true, then you have uncovered a dynamic worth exploring in your marketing efforts.

If it is not true, then you can free yourself from ‘wasting time’ in trying to whip up such a feeling.

Tribes are worth your time

American author, Seth Godin, wrote a book called Tribes a few years ago, in which he argued that we are now in an era of business that will rely more than ever on identifying and leading tribes.

He was urging us to think about who out there shares common yearnings, needs and wants, and would be likely to respond passionately to someone who could meet or satisfy them.

“A tribe is a group of people connected to one another, connected to a leader, and connected to an idea. For millions of years, human beings have been part of one tribe or another. A group needs only two things to be a tribe: a shared interest and a way to communicate.”

In a way, he was talking about target market segmentation, in which you isolate homogenous groups of people or prospective buyers and do your utmost to focus your marketing energy on them.

What he was really asking though, was for us to stop and do some rethinking about what we are trying to achieve and whether there are smarter ways of cultivating interest and energy around those goals; by starting with those among us who are aching for a change to arrive.

I’ll leave you with Godin’s TED talk on the issue. You’re also welcome to share your thoughts on Top End tribalism in the comments below or in your workplace.

Senator Stephen Conroy, left, with NBN Co boss, Mike Quigley.

To kick off the RITE series blogs for 2013, I am sharing a link to a post on the Darwin Digital Enterprise Program website.

It is a quick update on the local NBN rollout.

It also contains information about the free workshop and mentoring series which resumes next month in Darwin.

Take a look at NBN broadband in Darwin: Patience to be rewarded.

And if you no anybody in a local community organisation or not-for-profit, you might like to forward the link onto them, as they are included in the program.

Firecrackers up clackers and other headlines (Image Carly & Art via Flickr)

The NT News has a worldwide reputation, thanks to its brazen approach to headlines.

But is there anything we can learn from the paper for our online marketing efforts?

The short answer is, it depends on your goals.

But first, congratulations to the NT News, and Deputy Editor, Paul Dyer, for claiming a Walkley Award for the paper’s unique headline style.

Paul won Australia’s top journalism award last week for these headline gems:

• Why I Stuck A Cracker Up My Clacker
• Eyeful Tower
• Dogs of Phwoaarr

We know the NT News gets talked about and noticed well beyond the Top End, and most of that is due to its headlines.

So let’s see if there is something of value for bloggers or whether this whole article is a croc (my attempt and injecting some NT News success formula – reference a crocodile).

Three ways headlines help your blog

The three ways headlines can help your blog are:

• Making articles easy for Google to reference and suggest, due to clear, topical keyword
• Being memorable due to a unique phrase or word so that someone searching for your article specifically will more easily find it
• Grabbing attention when the headline is seen incidentally

Headlines for SEO

The first approach is the one I focus on most with my clients.

The assumption is that people do not necessarily know you exist, or that you sell a particular product or service, so we write headlines that align with the most common questions your prospective customers will ask to help Google recommend us to them.

An example might be: Countdown to NBN going live in Darwin is on in earnest at the Duck Pond. This is about the NBN rollout in town but is also about the NBN small business workshops I am running in Winnellie through the Business Enterprise Centre for the next year or so.

From a Google perspective, this headline should help the article be suggested in search results when people look for information on when the NBN is going live in Darwin, especially if they have heard about the Duck Pond being one of the first places to go live.

Headlines for recall

The second approach is useful when you know your story will be referenced and promoted elsewhere. By using a unique or rarely-used word/phrase, it will make it easy for people to find your article through Google because you will be one of the few writers using your particular grouping of terms.

An example would be: Why I stuck a cracker up my clacker. If you had heard there was a story doing the rounds from the NT News about firecrackers and clackers, a quick Google search on the term clacker indeed brings you straight to the story.

The key to this approach is making sure you push and promote your story to people likely to push and promote it further.

Headlines to grab attention

The final approach is to write a headline which has the ability to grab attention when it is seen. Here, I refer to article titles that take you by surprise or intrigue you but do NOT necessarily contain keywords that would help Google recommend this story to someone in search, based on topic alone.

An example would be: Listen in locally to Twitter questions. This article is actually about eavesdropping in Social Media in the Top End using a free tool called Hootsuite. However, at the time it was published, I had a longer list of ‘recent articles’ on the right hand side of the site and having its headline there did entice visitors to click through. They were not searching on the topic, they were just curious after discovering the site for other reasons.

What have we learned?

So the NT News, because it has an established network for promotion and readers of its stories have already gone to the source when they discover stories (they are holding the newspaper or gone to the website), is a great exponent of the second and third approaches to headline writing.

For your small business or organisation, I suggest focussing on the first approach with an occasional experiment in the other two. This is because the first approach does the better job in helping you get discovered by people actually searching for your particular type of product or service.

Feel free to share your favourite or most powerful headlines in the comments.

Curiosity was the order of the day – nobody was really pinning their hopes on Pinterest

Yes, a pun about pins.

This week’s post came about after an intense training day in Darwin last week, in which a dozen local business people took part in the Darwin Digital Enterprise Program.

Amid the thinking about and exploration of various new online tools, Pinterest grabbed the group’s imagination.

As you will see in the post originally published on the Marketing Minds blog, a lot happened as we pondered pinning.

It was a great example of learning about a new concept, thinking about your own business and your market, then brainstorming different ways to exploit the new learnings.

Please go ahead and read the full article:

Interest begins with a ‘P’: Brainstorming marketing uses of Pinterest

I hope you find something useful for your business.

PS I promised the group I would keep preaching that the Top End is really a hot bed of business innovation and the original article was just another example.

PPS If you have some other ways you use Pinterest for your business, please share them in the comments below.

This photo was referred to in the talk and discussion. I shot it with Instagram during the workshop and shared it online. I learned I I can sue anybody who uses this image to make money, even though I shared it with the world.

Have you ever sweated a little, just before hitting publish on a blog article?

Have you ever wondered whether that new web page had a little too much content ‘borrowed’ from other people?

Earlier this week, I pulled together some thoughts from a talk given by a partner at Andersons Solicitors in Adelaide, on the topic of social media marketing and your legal obligations.

The information was universally applicable and important, so here is the link for you to visit it yourself and maybe share with any colleagues or friends who are using the online medium for marketing.

Plan, Think, Publish: The legally safe approach to social media marketing

If you have questions or further comments, please share them via the comments section below.

First cab off the rank is Ultimate Gym and Fitness.

Vania and Phil from Ultimate Gym attended the October Business Month events and have taken their next steps into the world of using online video.

I say ‘next’ steps because they have already used video in the past but came along to the Lights, Camera, Blog workshops to pick up some extra tips.

You will see they are playing with more of a casual feel and a ‘peep behind the curtain’ approach.

Videos by Vania

I particularly like this first video because it is simple and if I were in their target market I would be keen to see what Phil does pre and post workout to help him achieve the muscle development and tone that he does.

I also like the fact that he is ‘matter of fact’ about what he has chosen, rather than come across as a salesperson.

Here is: What pre workout supplements should I take before training?

The next video is: Take a tour of Ultimate Gym and Fitness, Darwin!

I love Vania’s style here, giving us a warm tour of her facility with a few ‘winks to camera’, especially when she takes us into the ‘ladies only’ area.

What will you be shooting next?