Social Media, Marketing and Change – Herding Cats

Change is continuous. Especially if you are a small business and online. We’re pretty unusual with PMC, since we have been a 2-person company since 1984, which is a very long time in the consulting and training marketplace. And, we’re changing again, Big Time, to bring out our old board game as a new online one, and updat.

I initially posted this blog back in 2011 as I was working to establish social media stuff and I thought an edit and an update might be interesting. Since then I had tried to retire to Ecuador with modest success, but I am still working half time and bringing our new products. We took my sole-proprietorship (PMC) and made it into an LLC, under Joan’s leadership. I took off for a life of relaxation and travel, basing myself in Cuenca. And then COVID…

But as I look back on it, it really was pretty wild back then. We’ve moved our PMC shopping cart four or five different times, with each new platform offering new benefits. We’re about to shift over to WordPress soon.

Like many people in small businesses, I use Facebook and now have numerous pages marketing my tools and talking about other things there, but I do not do any advertising with them. Twitter, Scoop.it, Pinterest all got a little of my time. Then there is this blogging on WordPress with two blogs and all my activities on LinkedIn. And, there are others including YouTube, List.ly, Discus, Digg, and more.

In a word, “Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.!!!!!!
   (…if that is a word.)

The Square Wheels in getting this stuff done have been everywhere, from having the new CSS templates default to medium gray letters on a dark gray background to insuring our old links from the old blog work and back-link accurately and stuff like that. And, changing the shopping cart also meant that we changed all the page urls, so we needed to do all that forwarding of old to new. There were hundreds of links from my old blog posts to the old pages on the old site that are now new pages on the new shopping cart that is changing again. (There are few things I hate more than a bad link.)

The most difficult thing was the converting the old page names to the new page names, which meant a few hundred changes here and there on my other pages that used those as links (that used to have working links to the pages on the old webpage). Making them a few at a time, and running the software that checks all the links from all the places was also a great deal of fun (not).

I know that we have old backlinks from other people’s sites that used to connect back to articles and the like on my site(s) that will not work any more.

In a word, “Square Wheels really ARE everywhere!”  (Hope you are having some fun, too.)

There is that, “Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.!!!!!! again.

We have spent the last 8 months doing a conversion of the features of our board game version of The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine into a new virtual version designed for remote workers and supervisor-led team building and performance improvement.

So, as Dilbert said, “Change is good. You go first.” Or, in reality, change is necessary and there is often nobody to do it except you. Git ‘er done!

You might like The Moose Joke  because all this process of improvement IS like going 50 feet farther than last year.

Download the Moose Joke

Social Media is forcing this old guy to be more social, I guess…

Scott Simmerman Ph.D. CPF, CPT is still managing partner of PMC and collaborating with the team at PMC LLC, but also sort of retired…

There are a whole lot of videos on our YouTube site at PMC864

Here is a file about our testimonials on our board game version of the Lost Dutchman team building game: